Adaptive Fault-Tolerant Formation Control for Multiple UAVs Under Unknown Actuator Faults

Aiming at the fault-tolerance under unknown but bounded actuator faults for the multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) system, the study of this paper proposes the fault-tolerant control (FTC) method with adaptive laws for the formation cooperation of multiple rotorcraft UAVs (RUAVs). Based on the dynamic analysis of the RUAV, the consensus method is applied to construct an outer guidance loop, and the reference tracking and formation control is achieved based on the leader-follower method. For the further performance under actuator faults, an inner control loop is designed via the passive FTC idea, in which some adaptive laws are synthesized to deal with unknown actuator fault magnitudes together with the robust controller and actuator saturation. Eventually, to illustrate the performance of the fault-tolerant formation control, some simulation results are shown, and compared with the method without the fault-tolerant enhancement.