Retrofit fault‐tolerant tracking control design of an unmanned quadrotor helicopter considering actuator dynamics

Abstract

Summary This paper presents a retrofit fault‐tolerant tracking control (FTTC) design method with application to an unmanned quadrotor helicopter (UQH). The proposed retrofit fault‐tolerant tracking controller is developed to accommodate loss‐of‐effectiveness faults in the actuators of UQH. First, a state feedback tracking controller acting as the normal controller is designed to guarantee the stability and satisfactory performance of UQH in the absence of actuator faults, while actuator dynamics of UQH are also considered in the controller design. Then, a retrofit control mechanism with integration of an adaptive fault estimator and an adaptive fault compensator is devised against the adverse effects of actuator faults. Next, the proposed retrofit FTTC strategy, which is synthesized by the normal controller and an additional reconfigurable fault compensating mechanism, takes over the control of the faulty UQH to asymptotically stabilize the closed‐loop system with an acceptable performance degradation in the presence of actuator faults. Finally, both numerical simulations and practical experiments are conducted in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed FTTC methodology on the asymptotic convergence of tracking error for several combinations of loss‐of‐effectiveness faults in actuators.

Event-Triggered Adaptive Fault Tolerant Control for a Class of Uncertain Nonlinear Systems

“…Viable structure control [ 7 ], sliding mode control [ 8 ], fuzzy control [ 9 ], model predictive control [ 10 ], neural networks theory [ 11 ], and passivity theory [ 12 ] techniques have been proposed for reducing or even eliminating the impact of the failures. From the point of practical application, a significant amount of research on FTC schemes is applied to aerospace aircraft [ 13 ], power equipment [ 14 , 15 ], industrial processes [ 16 ], etc.…”

Distributed adaptive fractional‐order fault‐tolerant cooperative control of networked unmanned aerial vehicles via fuzzy neural networks

“…To avoid the catastrophes induced by the actuator faults, advanced fault-tolerant control (FTC) strategies must be developed to enhance flight safety. Recently, plentiful of FTC schemes have been proposed for single UAV [25][26][27][28][29]. By utilising the approximation capability of FNN, [20] presented a sliding-mode FTC scheme for an aircraft to counteract actuator faults.…”

“…(ii) Compared with the FTC methods developed for a single UAV, including [27,29], an FTCC scheme is proposed in this paper for networked UAVs in the presence of actuator faults. Moreover, in contrast to the centralised leader-follower FTCC schemes presented in [30,31], which may induce instability to the formation team if a group of follower UAVs loses the communications with the leader UAV since all follower UAVs only communicate with the leader UAV in this scheme, the FTCC scheme presented in this paper is developed for UAVs in a distributed communication network, in which each follower UAV can communicate with its neighbouring UAVs to eventually achieve the attitude tracking with respect to the leader UAV.…”

Nonlinear Adaptive Line-of-Sight Path Following Control of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles considering Sideslip Amendment and System Constraints

“…As an ideal platform, innovative unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been strongly demanded by commercial, scientific, and military communities [1] for a variety of applications, such as environmental monitoring and surveillance [2,3], testing and validation platforms for newly developed control techniques [4][5][6], postdisaster search and rescue [7], cooperative and formation control [8][9][10][11], goods delivery and in-flight refueling [12][13][14], and various military missions [15]. e deployment of UAVs, however, is generally in confined space and hostile environment and subjects to environmental disturbances and sideslip effects.…”