Distributed adaptive fault-tolerant time-varying formation tracking control for QUAVs against actuator fault and saturation

This paper addresses a problem of distributed adaptive fault-tolerant time-varying formation tracking control for nonlinear quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle systems (QUAVs) in the presence of actuator faults and saturation. First, by analyzing the dynamics of the QUAVs and considering the effects of actuator faults and saturation, a nonlinear model of the QUAV system consisting of a position subsystem and an attitude subsystem is constructed. Next, in the position subsystem, an adaptive reconfigurable fault-tolerant formation controller is designed based on the local information between QUAVs and the fault estimates provided by the observer. Furthermore, in the attitude subsystem, an adaptive attitude fault-tolerant controller based on fast terminal sliding mode (FTSM) is designed to ensure the fast-tracking of the desired attitude angle by the QUAV. Finally, the feasibility of the designed control scheme is verified by simulation experiments.