A fault detection and isolation scheme for formation control of fixed-wing UAVs

This paper presents an approach to fault detection and isolation for a network composed by multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) flying in formation. The methodology consists on the use of a bank of unknown input observers (UIO) that runs in each UAV in order to generate a set of residual signals, that will be used to perform the detection. To this end, we consider an extended version of the unicycle model to describe the kinematics of the UAVs and apply a convenient coordinate transformation to make the resulting closed loop dynamics of the overall multi-UAVs so that be described by two almost identical decoupled affine systems. This allows us to use a linear procedure by considering the independent term as a constant known external input. Simulation results under non-linear faults in the UAVs are presented and discussed.