Fault-Tolerant Game Control for Quadrotor Helicopters' Formation: A Fully Actuated System Approach

This article proposes a fault-tolerant game control methodology that facilitates the simultaneous inner loop attitude tracking and outer loop formation control of quadrotor helicopters subject to actuator faults. The quadrotor helicopters are modeled as fully actuated systems, based on which, an incentive Stackelberg differential graphical game is established for studying the bidirectional interactions between the inner and outer loops. In such a game, the rotational subsystems act as follower players responsible for achieving inner loop fault-tolerant attitude tracking, whereas the translational subsystems act as leader players responsible for achieving outer loop fault-tolerant formation control. In addition, an adaptive fault estimation law is proposed for fault compensation, facilitating controller reconfiguration not only for the inner loop but also for the outer loop. Rigorous analysis shows that the proposed fault-tolerant game control ensures the boundedness of fault estimation errors, attitude tracking errors, and formation errors. Moreover, an interactive Stackelberg equilibrium is achieved under the designed fault-tolerant game controllers. Finally, simulations are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.