Towards a Reliable and Lightweight Onboard Fault Detection in Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

This paper proposes a new model for onboard physical fault detection on autonomous unmanned aerial ve- hicles (UAV) through machine learning (ML) techniques. The proposal performs the detection task with high accuracies and minimal processing requirements while signaling an unreliable ML model to the operator, implemented in two main phases. First, a wrapper-based feature selection is performed to de- crease the feature extraction computational costs, coped with a classification assessment technique to identify ML model unreliability. Second, physical UAV faults are signaled through a multi-view rationale that evaluates a variety of UAV sensors while triggering alerts based on a sliding window scheme. Experiments performed on a real quadcopter UAV with a broken propeller use case shows the proposal’s feasibility. Our model can decrease the false-positive rates up to only 0.4%, while also decreasing the computational costs by at least 43% when compared to traditional techniques. Notwithstanding, it can identify ML model unreliability, signaling the UAV operator when model fine-tuning is needed.