Distributed Prescribed Performance Fault-Tolerant Control of Multi-UAVs With Input Delays via Dynamic Event-Triggered Observers

This article concentrates on the distributed fault-tolerant control (FTC) issue for a herd of delayed unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) subject to actuator faults, sensor faults, and full-state prescribed performance (FSPP). A novel distributed event-triggered observer is devised to reconstruct the leader’s states within a finite time, and a Zeno-free dynamic triggering condition is put forward to schedule information transmission between neighboring UAVs. Unknown nonlinear dynamics are handled via radial basis function neural networks. By cleverly combining the presented observer and backstepping control techniques, a distributed FTC paradigm is constructed such that the estimated leader states can be tracked. Besides, finite-time performance functions are introduced to ensure that the tracking errors converge to the specified regions within a bounded time. It is shown by Lyapunov theory that all closed-loop signals are practically finite-time stable, and the FSPP restrictions are strictly obeyed. Finally, case studies are reported to corroborate the practical merits of the presented methodology.