Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Inventive Systems and Control (ICISC 2020)

IEEE Xplore Part Number: CFP20J06-ART; ISBN: 978-1-7281-2813-9

IoT based Automatic Fault Identification and

Alerting System for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
1st Vamsi krishna Varigonda 2nd Bhavya Agrawal 3rd Vinoth Kumar Annamalai
Dept. of Electronics and Dept. of Information Dept. of Aerospace Engineering
communication Technology
SRM Institute of Science and Technology SRM Institute of Science and Technology SRM Institute of Science and
Technology
Kattankulathur, India Kattankulathur, India Kattankulathur, India
vv922 2@ srmist.ed u.in bhavya13agarwal@gmail.com vinothk a@ srmist.e du.in

Abstract— This research paper proposes an automatic fault
identification and alerting system to improve the reliability of
UAVs. In general, due to its less reliable nature, they are not being
deployed in populated areas. The low reliability in UAVs is due to
the high failure rates in the operations. Most of these fai lures can
be avoided if the operator is alerted in time about the faults in
the UAV. The proposed system will identify faults in UAVs and
alert the operator, wherein he can take the required action to
avoid the damage to the UAV. The system fetches the real- time
flight parameters of the UAV from the flight controller and gets a
sense of surroundings using external obstacle detecting sensors.
These parameters are analyzed by the processing board on the
drone for any anomalies. The parameters displayed in an
android application where the live status of the drone can be
monitored and all the parameters are stored in a database for
future analysis. An alert is sent to the operator on the mobile
application in case of any anomalies or early signs of faults
detected by the algorithm. The system also locates all the drones
flying in that region which can be utilized for air traffic
monitoring and to locate rogue drones which are a huge security
threat in airports and unauthorized areas.
Index terms—UAVs, IoT, fault detection, alerting system
I. INT RODUCT ION
Drones are quite popular in the present era and are used
in various commercial applications as well as in research.
Between 2016 and 2020, goldman s achs forecasted a 100
billion market opportunity for drones [15]. In operations
involving search and res cue, aerial photography, structural
inspections, and military surveillance, it is critical for the UAV
to perform the mission and return back. In a report given by the
Department of Defense (DoD) of the United States of America
[1], concludes that small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) or
drones have tremendous failure rates. The requirement by the
Federal Aviation Administration of the United States (FAA) is
−
to have the failure rate of an aerial vehicle is 10 9 failures-per-
flight-hour, but the unmanned vehicle (UAV) has a failure rate
−
at 10 2 failures-per-flight-hour. This being the reason many
local government agencies, researchers who owned UAVs had
to abandon the use of UAVs due to liability, reliability, and
privacy concerns [5] [17,18]. This concludes when flying in a
long-range, the likelihood of the drone to either crash or loses
control from the ground station is high, and UAVs are not re-
liable for crucial tasks. Many of UAVs used for civilian
applications are commercial off the shelf actuators [2] these
UAVs do not have fault detection and black box systems. In
this paper, automatic fault identification and alerting system
are designed and implemented on a multi-rotor unmanned
aerial vehicle. The goal of the research is to create a system
that keeps track and observe the flight conditions, detect
obstacles, analyze the flight parameters from on-board flight
controller for any possibility of faults, i.e., system failure,
components malfunctions, signal loss, and environmental
parameters like wind speed, rain. Consequently, alert the
operator regarding the anomalies in the flight parameters
thereby allowing the operator to take the necessary actions to
avoid failure or crash. Secondly, rogue drones are potential
threats to the nation. In 2018, tens of thousands of passengers
have been disrupted by drones flying over one of the UK’s
busiest airports [16]. The rogue drones are small, have less
radar surface area leading to greater difficulty in locating
them. We propose a centralized location system wherein all
the drones carrying the proposed system will send the
location, altitude, speed to a separate database which can help
the authorities to improve the air traffic control and monitor
all the drones flying in that region.
II. M E T HODOL OGY
A. Setup
1) Unmanned Aerial Vehicle: Considering ease of use and
accessibility a basic frame called the DJI450 frame is selected
along with 1000 kV brush-less dc (BLDC) motors, and 30 amp
electronic speed controllers (ESC), a pixhawk flight controller
with a primary 3 cell lipo battery. This is the most common
setup of UAV. The setup is shown in figure 1.
2) Processing board: A raspberry pi 3b processing board
running on raspbian software is used. A serial connection
between the pixhawk flight controller and raspberry pi is
established via a micro USB connection.
3) GSM Module: A smartElex module is used to establish
internet connectivity to the system, which enables the data
transfer to the servers. It is a combination of GPRS and GNSS.

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 Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Inventive Systems and Control (ICISC 2020)
IEEE Xplore Part Number: CFP20J06-ART; ISBN: 978-1-7281-2813-9
Fig. 1. T est UAV with the fault identification system
The GNSS engine is a single receiver integrating GPS and
GLONASS.
4) Additional sensors: Infrared (IR) sensor, combined with
ultrasonic sensors, is used to find obstacles in the flying en-
vironment. This combination is used to increase the precision
of the measurement of an obstacle. As ultrasonic sensors give
false readings in regions with s moke, fog and IR sensors give
a false reading when direct light is incident on the receiving
unit of the sensor.
B. Design of system
The design of the system is divided into three major parts as
follows.
1) Fault Identification System (FIS) design: The fault
identification system is an on-board processing board, which
continuously fetches the flight parameters from the flight
controller using micro aerial vehicle commands (mavlink) and
simultaneously data from the obstacle detecting sensors are
fetched. The flight parameters include altitude, IMU values,
acceleration, GPS location, telemetry strength, battery voltage.
These are then analyzed by an algorithm that constantly
compares all the parameters with the safety limit for any
anomalies. As shown in 2, once the processing is done, these
are then stored in a real-time database. The database also acts
as data-logger or black box, which stores all the data with a
timestamp. If any parameter is above the safety limit, it is
declared are fault by the system. This fault is displayed to the
user in the mobile application which is discussed in the next
section. The user can avert the damaging or probably crashing
of the UAV by taking the required action to rectify the fault.
2) Alerting system design: The end-user interface of the
alerting system is handled by a mobile/web application that
has a record of the real-time values of the flight parame- ters.
These values can be checked and audited on a real- time basis,
thus keeping track of every data changed. The database for
this system can be deployed on any real-time database
supporting models such as firebase. It stores the data in
JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format in which
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Fig. 2. Data collection and processing in the fault identification system
queries for inserting, updating, deleting, or adding data are
not required. This back-end service is implemented using an
API that is provided to the application developer. This API
ensures the synchronization of data between cloud storage and
the client’s interface on a real-time basis. The complete
process flow of the mobile/web application is shown in figure 3
libraries can be integrated with android, IOS, and javas cript
applications to allow the usage of these services. By using the
authentication service that can authenticate users using client-
side code the mobile/web application can be secured. The fault
declared by the fault identification system is displayed by push
notification to alert the user. The specific parameter which
causes fault is also shown by allowing the user to make the
required rectifications.
C. Centralized Locating system
In this research the GPS coordinates, altitude, speed of all
the drones flying in a given region are stored in a centralized
database. The databases serve as an index to the real-time
fight details bounded in given area coordinates. There are three
approaches in order to start for location identification in a UAV
[10] they are, Tracking way-point, simulation tracking, and
flight based records.
1) Tracking way-point: The local tracking strategy can be
best enhanced to a global system. [11] Research clearly
discusses the architecture of a global flight tracking system.
This study proposes a divided back end system of several mod-
ules which includes in-range communication medium channel,
to establish a connection; a real-time database, to store flight
statistics; and a ground station to keep a check on the flight
stats. The common way-points considered while tracking
multiple UAVs in bounded airspace can be GPS coordinates,
speed and the altitude of the flight.
21
 Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Inventive Systems and Control (ICISC 2020)
IEEE Xplore Part Number: CFP20J06-ART; ISBN: 978-1-7281-2813-9
Fig. 3. data flow between fault identification system and app
2) Simulation based tracking: The research [12]
demonstrates an exhaustive search method that simulates to
assess the state of the flight in the future and to judge its path.
Alternative tracking paths can be obtained mapping the
position and velocities of the flights airborne.
3) Flight-based Records: The system proposes a data log-
ger both at the global and local levels. A black box or an in-
flight data recorder is proposed to be installed on UAVs in
order to track the overall set of data for different factors
pertaining to a flight leading to an abnormality. In-flight data
such as altitude, battery voltage, horizontal and vertical
velocities, relative wind speed, and IMU values are gathered
and compressed by a Data Acquisition Unit(DAU) [13] and is
into binary data. The study [14] idealizes a realistic app roach
to realize a Flight Data Recorder (FDR) for a system. .
D . Functioning of the System
The functioning of the complete system is dependent on
multiple segments which are explained in detail below.
1) Mavlink protocol: The pixhawk flight controller stack
runs on an open-source software specially designed for de-
velopers and researchers. The Mavlink (Micro Aerial Vehicle
link) protocol [8] is used to get various real-time vehicle
parameters like GPS position, altitude, speed, battery voltage,
and discharge, etc. Mavlink protocol is utilized for the
communication between the Pixhawk flight controller and the
processing board.
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Fig. 4. Schematic diagram of the fault identification system
2) Dronekit: Dronekit [9] is a python API that enables
simple interfacing of the mavlink protocol. By using dronekit,
complete autonomous navigation can be developed. We have
extensively used Dronekit to fetch various flight parameters.
3) Detecting the faults in UAV: The raspberry pi processing
board will be running the program with Dronekit in a loop
to continuously fetch the data. The flight parameters include
IMU readings, battery voltage, vertical and horizontal velocity,
current altitude, GPS coordinates, satellite lock, radio signal
strength (RSSI value). A check is done on the fetched flight
parameters with respect to the threshold values to detect any
possibility of anomalies. The schematic diagram is displayed
in the 4. Connectivity with the server is provided by the GSM
module connected to the raspberry pi 3b board controlled by
AT commands. All the values are then displayed in the app
and If any fault is detected, a pop notification appears on the
mobile application.
4) Client-Server interaction: A Python Firebase API, called
Pyrebase, is used as a client that sends data from the
processing to the cloud storage. A separate database is used
for the centralized location system where the GPS coordinates,
altitude, speed of the drone. Any change in values in the fault
identification system is directly reflected in the cloud storage.
These values are then fetched by the mobile application. As
flight checks are completed, the data gets updated, and the user
can get real-time values from the fault identification system.
5) Android Application: The app has been developed using
the android studio SDK as a development tool. The user
authorization and sign-in validation are done at the client-side
using firebase services in the mobile application. The
authorized user can view the parameters in the mobile
application. Parameters from DIS are fetched from a real-time
database deployed on the firebase. A pop notification appears
whenever the algorithm detects any possibility of failure. This
alerts the pilot wherein he can take the required action to
avoid the fault which might lead to a crash of UAV. This
application is tool when flying the UAV beyond LOS
22
 Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Inventive Systems and Control (ICISC 2020)
IEEE Xplore Part Number: CFP20J06-ART; ISBN: 978-1-7281-2813-9

Fig. 6. Battery voltage Vs. T ime log of the flight test

Fig. 5. Flight parameters displayed in the application

(Line of Sight) without any FPV (first-person view) system.

III. FLIGHT TEST
Flight test phases are divided into take-off, system
implementation, and landing. In the implementation phase, the
pilot flies the copter by carrying the fault identification on
board. The total flight time was around 12 minutes per flight.
An average distance of 500 meters at 13 meters altitude was
covered by the test copter. A total of three test flights were
carried out in different conditions, as mentioned: 1. Low
altitude casual flying conditions with Line of sight 2. Wind y
conditions and medium range. 3. Long-range
Fig. 7. Altitude Vs. T ime log of the flight test
I V. RESULT
From the three flight tests conducted, results were obtained.
All the flight parameters were logged and evaluated. The app
has displayed all the flight parameters , which can be used for
further analysis. All the flight parameters are stored in a server
that is displayed in the application. From the data obtained two
graphs were obtained, a voltage vs. time 7 and altitude vs.
time graph 7.
The mobile application will notify the pilot whenever the
parameters are beyond the threshold values. During the test
flight, the pilot was alerted regarding the low voltage. This
avoids critical damage to the copter. Notifications are sent by
using the mobile applications in order to alert the pilot
regarding low voltage is shown in the figure 8.

V . CONCLUSION
In this paper, we have developed a fault identification,
alerting and a tracking sys tem for unmanned aerial vehicle Fig. 8. Notification alerting the pilot
platform that can be implemented to increase the reliability of

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 Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Inventive Systems and Control (ICISC 2020)
IEEE Xplore Part Number: CFP20J06-ART; ISBN: 978-1-7281-2813-9

UAV. We have conducted various flight tests with the fault

identification and alerting system on board. This system can be
used to reduce failures in UAVs and also to effectively track
the UAVs that can be used for air traffic monitoring and
control. Fault reduction is achieved by alerting the pilot after
analyzing the flight parameters of UAV regarding the
possibility of any failure. The implemented system can avoid
potential damage by warning the pilot regarding a fault in the
mission. This results in a better reliability of UAVs in various
applications and improves the aerial security.
V I. FUT URE SCOPE
The current system proposed in this research limits and its
implementation on specific flight controllers of UAVs. To
make the system proposed in this research capable of
implementation that remains irrespective of the hardware. To
create a centralized system that monitors all the UAV traffic
and communicates with the airports authority. To create a
tracking system that detects any rouge UAVs that are entering
into unauthorized areas.
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