Enhancing Transportation Reliability: Refined Fault-Tolerant Control for Fixed-Wing AAVs Under Constraints and Actuator Imperfections

Transportation safety critically relies on the reliable and precise trajectory tracking control of fixed-wing autonomous aerial vehicles (AAVs). Consequently, actuator imperfections coupled with state constraints challenge AAV operations, necessitating an enhanced controller that integrates anti-windup capabilities and robust fault tolerance, particularly in dynamic transportation scenarios. This paper proposes a refined fault-tolerant control (FTC) scheme for fixed-wing AAVs to maintain high-performance and safe operation under actuator faults, external disturbances, and multiple constraints including state limits, input magnitude and rate saturations (MRS). The scheme integrates a fixed-time improved extended state observer (IESO) that rapidly estimates lumped uncertainties (including faults/disturbances) and actively compensates for input magnitude and rate constraints, which prevents performance degradation. Based on this estimation, a finite-time fractional-order FTC (FTFOFTC) is developed using fractional-order (FO) backstepping and barrier Lyapunov functions to enforce state constraints. This leverages the unique properties of FO calculus for flexible performance tuning and refined tracking dynamics. Lyapunov stability analysis proves the boundedness of all estimation and tracking errors. Extensive simulations validate that the proposed FTFOFTC guarantees desired trajectory tracking performance and system stability despite actuator imperfections, thereby significantly contributing to more robust and reliable AAV deployment in intelligent transportation systems.