Distributed fault-tolerant containment control for multi-UAVs with actuator and sensor faults

This paper considers the disturbance observer-based distributed fault-tolerant containment control problem for longitudinal motion of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (multi-UAVs) in the presence of actuator, sensor faults, and input saturation when only a subset of the multi-UAVs has access to the leaders. The communication network is an undirected, fixed topology and the distributed control scheme is proposed for each UAV with the information from neighboring UAVs. By using the disturbance observer (DO), the lumped uncertainties including actuator fault, sensor fault, and external disturbance are estimated. The computational complexity caused by the repeated derivatives of the virtual control item in traditional backstepping method is eliminated by using the command filter. The control input saturation is handled with an auxiliary dynamic system. By utilizing the command filter and disturbance observer technique, all follower UAVs can be driven into the convex hull spanned by the altitudes and velocities of leaders. Furthermore, by using graph theory and Lyapunov approach, it is shown that the proposed distributed control scheme can guarantee that the velocities and altitudes of follower UAVs can be driven to the convex hull formed by the altitudes and velocities of leaders and all signals of the resulting closed-loop system are ultimately uniform bound. Finally, numerical simulations are presented to verify the effectiveness of proposed distributed fault-tolerant containment control scheme.