Distributed Fault-Tolerant Cooperative Control for Multi-UAVs Under Actuator Fault and Input Saturation

This paper investigates a difficult problem of distributed fault-tolerant cooperative control for multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the presence of actuator faults and input saturation. To eliminate the “explosion of complexity” in the traditional backstepping architecture, the dynamic surface control is utilized to construct the distributed fault-tolerant control scheme. Moreover, by using the disturbance observer technique, actuator faults and external disturbances are estimated as lumped uncertainties. Furthermore, to reduce the adverse influence caused by the control input saturation of UAVs, auxiliary dynamic systems are introduced to regulate the control signals when the input signals are saturated for a long time. The key feature is that the proposed fault-tolerant cooperative controller is designed based on the local information of neighboring UAVs and the factors including actuator faults, input saturation, and external disturbances are simultaneously addressed. It is shown by Lyapunov approach and graph theory that the synchronization tracking stability can be guaranteed and all follower UAVs can track the leader UAV. The effectiveness of the proposed control scheme is further validated by numerical simulation results.