Fault-tolerant control strategies for tilt-rotor aerial-aquatic vehicles: Design and implementation

The cross-domain capabilities of aerial-aquatic vehicles (AAVs) hold significant potential for future air-sea integrated combat operations. However, the failure rate of AAVs is higher than that of unmanned systems operating in a single medium. To ensure the reliable and stable completion of tasks by AAVs, this paper proposes a tiltable quadcopter AAV to mitigate the potential issue of rotor failure, which can lead to high-speed spinning or damage during cross-media transitions. Experimental validation demonstrates that this tiltable quadcopter AAV can transform into a dual-rotor or triple-rotor configuration after losing one or two rotors, allowing it to perform cross-domain movements with enhanced stability and maintain task completion. This enhancement significantly improves its fault tolerance and task reliability.