Sliding Mode Active Fault-Tolerant Control for Nonlinear Quadrotor UAV System in Presence of Actuator Faults

This study focuses on active fault-tolerant control (AFTC) for actuator faults in quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) systems using the sliding mode control (SMC) approach. An adaptive observer is employed to estimate the magnitudes of actuator faults based on a complete nonlinear dynamic model of the quadcopter. This model includes high-order non-holonomic constraints and various physical phenomena impacting the quadcopter's behavior. A Lyapunov-based stability analysis reveals that the proposed control approach assures the stability of the closed-loop system, even in the presence of actuator faults. The numerical simulations demonstrate the efficacy of the suggested control strategy, with great tracking performance and the ability to recover from actuator faults. While the proposed FTC strategy shows promising results in simulations, real-time implementation will be explored in future work to validate the approach under real-world complexities and uncertainties.