Reinforcement Learning-Based Fractional-Order Adaptive Fault-Tolerant Formation Control of Networked Fixed-Wing UAVs With Prescribed Performance

This article investigates the fault-tolerant formation control (FTFC) problem for networked fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) against faults. To constrain the distributed tracking errors of follower UAVs with respect to neighboring UAVs in the presence of faults, finite-time prescribed performance functions (PPFs) are developed to transform the distributed tracking errors into a new set of errors by incorporating user-specified transient and steady-state requirements. Then, the critic neural networks (NNs) are developed to learn the long-term performance indices, which are used to evaluate the distributed tracking performance. Based on the generated critic NNs, actor NNs are designed to learn the unknown nonlinear terms. Moreover, to compensate for the reinforcement learning errors of actor-critic NNs, nonlinear disturbance observers (DOs) with skillfully constructed auxiliary learning errors are developed to facilitate the FTFC design. Furthermore, by using the Lyapunov stability analysis, it is shown that all follower UAVs can track the leader UAV with predesigned offsets, and the distributed tracking errors are finite-time convergent. Finally, comparative simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.