Distributed adaptive fault-tolerant cooperative control for multi-uavs against actuator and sensor faults

In this paper, a distributed adaptive fault-tolerant cooperative control (FTCC) scheme is developed for flying multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with consideration of actuator and sensor faults. The communication network is an undirected, fixed topology and only a subset of UAVs has access to the common reference. By using a sliding-mode observer, the common reference is estimated by each UAV. The lumped uncertainties including external disturbances, actuator and sensor faults are estimated by an adaptive mechanism. On the basis of the estimated reference and lumped uncertainties, dynamic surface control technique is utilized to eliminate the computational burden inherent in the traditional backstepping control architecture. The highlight is that external disturbances, actuator and sensor faults are considered in the distributed control scheme for multi-UAVs simultaneously. By using graph theory and Lyapunov-based method, it is proved that all signals in the closed-loop system are bounded. Furthermore, simulation results are exhibited to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.