Decentralized Adaptive Fault-Tolerant Cooperative Control of Multi-UAVs under Actuator Faults and Directed Communication Topology

In this paper, a decentralized adaptive fault-tolerant cooperative control scheme is proposed to achieve the attitude synchronization tracking control of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (multi-UAVs) with actuator faults and directed communication topology. To alleviate the adverse effects caused by the in-flight actuator faults, adaptive laws are constructed and integrated into the developed attitude synchronization control scheme to enhance the formation flight safety by using the neural networks. The distinctive feature of the proposed method is to address the fault-tolerant attitude synchronization tracking control problem in a decentralized framework with directed communications. It is shown that the tracking and synchronization of multi-UAVs with respect to the desired attitudes can be achieved. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control approach.