Simulation-to-reality UAV Fault Diagnosis in windy environments

Monitoring propeller failures is vital to maintain the safe and reliable operation of quadrotor UAVs. The simulation-to-reality UAV fault diagnosis technique offer a secure and economical approach to identify faults in propellers. However, classifiers trained with simulated data perform poorly in real flights due to the wind disturbance in outdoor scenarios. In this work, we propose an uncertainty-based fault classifier (UFC) to address the challenge of sim-to-real UAV fault diagnosis in windy scenarios. It uses the ensemble of difference-based deep convolutional neural networks (EDDCNN) to reduce model variance and bias. Moreover, it employs an uncertainty-based decision framework to filter out uncertain predictions. Experimental results demonstrate that the UFC can achieve 100% fault-diagnosis accuracy with a data usage rate of 33.6% in the windy outdoor scenario.

Difference-based Deep Convolutional Neural Network for Simulation-to-reality UAV Fault Diagnosis

Identifying the fault in propellers is important to keep quadrotors operating safely and efficiently. The simulation-to-reality (sim-to-real) UAV fault diagnosis methods provide a cost-effective and safe approach to detect the propeller faults. However, due to the gap between simulation and reality, classifiers trained with simulated data usually underperform in real flights. In this work, a new deep neural network (DNN) model is presented to address the above issue. It uses the difference features extracted by deep convolutional neural networks (DDCNN) to reduce the sim-to-real gap. Moreover, a new domain adaptation method is presented to further bring the distribution of the real-flight data closer to that of the simulation data. The experimental results show that the proposed approach can achieve an accuracy of 97.9\% in detecting propeller faults in real flight. Feature visualization was performed to help better understand our DDCNN model.

Simulation-to-reality UAV Fault Diagnosis with Deep Learning

Accurate diagnosis of propeller faults is crucial for ensuring the safe and efficient operation of quadrotors. Training a fault classifier using simulated data and deploying it on a real quadrotor is a cost-effective and safe approach. However, the simulation-to-reality gap often leads to poor performance of the classifier when applied in real flight. In this work, we propose a deep learning model that addresses this issue by utilizing newly identified features (NIF) as input and utilizing domain adaptation techniques to reduce the simulation-to-reality gap. In addition, we introduce an adjusted simulation model that generates training data that more accurately reflects the behavior of real quadrotors. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed approach achieves an accuracy of 96\% in detecting propeller faults. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first reliable and efficient method for simulation-to-reality fault diagnosis of quadrotor propellers.