Adaptive fault-tolerant control of a novel ducted-fan aerial robot against partial actuator failure

This research is aimed at an adaptive fault-tolerant control scheme for a special ducted-fan aerial robot against partial actuator failure. Although the ducted-fans are widely used in aircraft propulsion systems, their aerodynamic complexity is an enormous challenge for fault-tolerant control. This paper proposes an adaptive control mechanism based on an identified state-space model in the frequency domain. The fault-tolerant controller includes a robust baseline loop and an adaptive loop. The adaptive loop is coupled with an estimator and a reconfigurable adjust law to estimate the actuator failure and compensate for different degrees of failure. The performance of the algorithm is verified by theoretical simulations and real-time flight experiments.