An SMC-based fault tolerant control design for a class of underactuated unmanned aerial vehicles

This paper proposes a fault tolerant control design for a class of under-actuated unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). The design is based on separating the system dynamics into two sub-systems, a Fully Actuated (FAS) and an Under-actuated Subsystem (UAS). A Nonsingular Fast Terminal Sliding Mode Controller (NFTSMC) is then designed for the FAS subsystem and an Under-actuated Sliding Mode Controller (USSMC) is derived for the UAS subsystem. The controllers' parameters were auto-tuned using a Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm. The proposed scheme was implemented to a quadrotor UAV subject to actuator faults and disturbances. Stability analysis of the proposed scheme was carried over using the Lyapunov approach. Simulation results confirmed the tracking performance and robustness of the proposed approach.