De-centralized Control for Distributed Electric Propulsion Systems in Electric UAVs

This paper proposes a de-centralized control method for distributed electric propulsion (DEP) systems in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The traditional DEP system adopts a centralized control method and is equipped with similar redundancy. Such a control configuration suffers from single-point-of-failure and common mode faults. In this paper, a distributed control architecture is designed for the electric propulsion system, and a de-centralized control algorithm based on the pinning consensus is proposed to realize the synchronous control of the electric propeller speed and ensure the overall dynamic performance of the whole system. In addition, to address the problem that the cyber network may be disturbed by noise or gain loss, a disturbance reconfiguration approach based on continuous signal compensation is designed to autonomously compensate for the steady-state error and enhance the stability under system disturbance. The performance of the proposed controller has been validated using fine-tuned motor models.