Adaptive Fuzzy Leader‐Following Formation Control for Multi‐Uavs With External Disturbances and Sensor Faults

ABSTRACT This article investigates an adaptive fault‐tolerant formation control of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) affected by sensor faults and external disturbances. In this paper, a dynamic estimator based on an adaptive law is designed to obtain the state loss intervals after reconstructing the ideal states of the systems by coordinate transformation. In addition, we represent the time‐varying and unknown disturbances with the outputs of the finite‐dimensional linear generators, which converts the disturbance rejection problem into an adaptive state estimation problem, thus efficiently realizing the disturbance tracking compensation task in combination with the backstepping method. Lyapunov stability analysis supports the design results from a theoretical point of view. Finally, the simulation results prove that the proposed controller can solve the problems of sensor faults and disturbances and realize the UAV formation control.