Distributed fault-tolerant formation control for multiple unmanned aerial vehicles under actuator fault and intermittent communication interrupt

摘要

This article develops a distributed adaptive fault-tolerant formation control scheme for the multiple unmanned aerial vehicles to counteract actuator faults and intermittent communication interrupt, where the issues on control input saturation and mismatched uncertainties are also addressed. The discontinuous communication protocol technique is exploited to achieve the stability of the formation system, if the conditions of dwell time and the rate of communication are satisfied. On the basis of the local information of neighboring unmanned aerial vehicles, a novel distributed adaptive mechanism is designed to estimate the bounds of actuator faults and uncertainties, where the input saturation is explicitly taken into consideration. The stability of the whole formation system under the designed fault-tolerant formation control strategy is analyzed using the Lyapunov approach. Finally, simulation results are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.