Fault-tolerant Control of Quadcopter UAVs Using Robust Adaptive Sliding Mode Approach

Abstract

In this paper, a fault-tolerant control method is proposed for quadcopter unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) to account for system uncertainties and actuator faults. A mathematical model of the quadcopter UAV is first introduced when faults occur in actuators. A normal adaptive sliding mode control (NASMC) approach is proposed as a baseline controller to handle the chattering problem and system uncertainties, which does not require information of the upper bound. To improve the performance of the NASMC scheme, radial basis function neural networks are combined with an adaptive scheme to make a quick compensation in presence of system uncertainties and actuator faults. The Lyapunov theory is applied to verify the stability of the proposed methods. The effectiveness of modified ASMC algorithm is compared with that of NASMC using numerical examples under different faulty conditions.