Nonlinear fault tolerant control for a tri-rotor UAV against rear servo's stuck fault

This paper presents a fault tolerant control strategy to deal with the rear servo's stuck fault of tri-rotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). An adaptive sliding mode based observer is utilized to estimate the rear servo's stuck fault which is unknown, and a feedback linearization based controller is designed to compensate for the rear servo's fault. To avoid the singularity associated with orientation representations, the unit quaternion representation is utilized to formulate the attitude controller. The composite stability is analysed via the Lyapunov-based method. Numerical Simulations show that the proposed fault tolerant control scheme has achieved good control performance against the rear servo's stuck fault.