Fault-Tolerant Control for a Tilting-Rotor Quadcopter Using Extended Kalman Filter-Enhanced Nonlinear Model Predictive Control

This paper proposes a fault-tolerant control strategy for a tilt-rotor quadcopter prototype, employing nonlinear model predictive control to ensure both attitude and position stability in the presence of rotor failures and time-varying disturbances. The strategy incorporates an extended Kalman filter observer to estimate model deviations induced by faults, enabling realtime compensation in subsequent control steps to achieve active fault tolerance. The proposed approach is validated through simulations and compared with an extended state observer-based controller under identical conditions. The results indicate that the tilt-rotor quadcopter maintains precise position control while preserving yaw stability, demonstrating superior performance and implementation feasibility.