Fault-Tolerant Control in Leader-Follower Distributed Formation Flight System

In this paper, fault-tolerant control (FTC) strategies in the case of distributed leader-follower formation flight are proposed. Such formation structure is poorly robust to the leader's failure, so, this paper takes into account such a case. Accordingly, two FTC methods are proposed. The first one is the "leaders’ redundancy", which considers the use of multiple leaders to avoid one agent’s dependency. While the second proposed FTC strategy is the "leaders switching topology", which considers switching between the faulty leader and a new one online, so the healthy agents in the formation can complete their mission. To illustrate the proposed methods, simulations using MATLAB/SIMULINK are conducted on a formation of quadrotor UAVs controlled using neighbor-based trajectory generation topology. The simulation results show very good performances, where the healthy agents in the formation can complete their mission even in the presence of the leader's severe fault.