Distributed Fault-Tolerant Control of UAV Formation Based On

Quadcopter UAV formations have been widely employed across diverse fields. However, UAV formations face challenges such as random and varied actuator failures, stringent tracking error constraints, and restricted power redundancy, which have significantly hindered their practical application. To address these issues, this paper presents a distributed fault-tolerant control strategy for UAV formations based on active fault-tolerant control allocation (AFTCA). By capitalizing on known fault information, the control efficiency matrix of UAVs is reconstructed. The control matrix weights are dynamically adjusted in response to real-time fault information, leading to the acquisition of a fault-tolerant control allocation matrix that enables effective fault-tolerant control allocation for quadcopter UAVs. The proposed algorithm has been contrasted with several existing algorithms, and the results starkly demonstrate its superiority in fault-tolerant flight under various single faults. Moreover, hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) formation flight experiments have been conducted. The experimental results substantiate the efficacy of the proposed algorithm in achieving fault-tolerant flight missions for quadcopter UAV formations under compound faults.