Fault prediction of unmanned aerial vehicles based on entropy weight fusion and temporal graph convolutional network with non-Euclidian structure

Abstract Predicting weak and hidden faults in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is challenging due to their variable operation conditions and complex mechanisms. Conventional neural network models process the multisensory data in the form of Euclidean structure, the intrinsic connections among the individual data points are easy to be disregarded. Additionally, multisensory data are always directly fed into the model without adequately considering the importance or contribution of each sensor. Hence, an UAV fault prediction method is proposed by combining entropy weight fusion with a temporal graph convolutional network (GCN) to address the above problems. Firstly, the importance of multisensory data of UAVs are evaluated by each entropy value, and the multisensory data fusion is further realized by multiplying corresponding signal and entropy weight. Secondly, the multisensory data combined with fusion data are transferred together into graph-structure by adjacent matrix based on the node connection between different sensor data. Finally, the graph-structure data with non-Euclidian distance properties are input into temporal GCN to both capture the spatial and temporal relationship of the data, achieving better fault prediction results of UAVs. It is demonstrated that the proposed method is both applicable and superior in characterizing and predicting fault time series information of UAVs through parameter analysis and comparison studies with various existing algorithms.