Fault-Tolerant Control and Identification of Systematic Partial Actuator Faults for RUAV

Systematic partial actuator faults are a prevalent yet often overlooked issue in rotary-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (RUAVs). This paper presents a novel fault-tolerance controller designed for path following scenarios in the presence of such actuator faults. To address fault impacts, an effective method for fault identification is proposed based on projection with saturation constraints. To further enhance reliability, a robust early warning strategy is developed utilizing intermediate variables’ estimation. The effectiveness of the proposed methods is rigorously demonstrated through theoretical analysis and experimental results.