Fault Diagnosis and Fault-Tolerant Control Scheme for Quadcopter UAVs with a Total Loss of Actuator

Abstract

Fault-tolerant control has drawn attention in recent years owning to its reliability and safe flight during missions. In this article, an active fault-tolerant control method is proposed to control a quadcopter in the presence of actuator faults and disturbances. Firstly, the dynamics of the quadcopter are presented. Secondly, a robust adaptive sliding mode Thau observer is presented to estimate the time-varying magnitudes of actuator faults. Thirdly, a fault-tolerant control scheme based on sliding mode control and reconfiguration technique is designed to maintain the quadcopter at the desired position despite the presence of faults. Unlike previous studies, the proposed method aims to integrate the fault diagnosis and a fault-tolerant control scheme into a single unit with total loss of actuator. Simulation results illustrate the efficiency of the suggested algorithm.