Adaptive Fault-Tolerant Control of a Hybrid Canard Rotor/Wing UAV under Transition Flight Subject to Actuator Faults and Model Uncertainties

This article proposes an adaptive fault-tolerant control scheme for an overactuated hybrid vertical take-off and landing canard rotor/wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to simultaneously compensate actuator faults and model uncertainties without the requirement of fault information and uncertain bounds. The proposed control scheme is constructed with two separate control modules. The high-level control module is developed with a novel adaptive sliding-mode controller, which is employed to maintain the overall system tracking performance in both faulty and fault-free conditions. The low-level control allocation module is used to distribute the virtual control signals that are generated by the high-level control module among the available redundant actuators. In the case of actuator faults, the proposed adaptive scheme can seamlessly adjust the control parameters to compensate the virtual control error and reconfigure the distribution of control signals among the available redundant actuators. A significant feature of this study is that the stability of the closed-loop system is guaranteed theoretically in the presence of both actuator faults and model uncertainties and overestimation of the adaptive control parameters can be avoided. The effectiveness of the proposed control strategy is validated through comparative simulation tests under different faulty and uncertain scenarios.