Fault Tolerant Control of a Quadrotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Based on Active Disturbance Rejection Control and Two-Stage Kalman Filter

This paper addresses the fault tolerant control problem of a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with the actuator loss-of-effectiveness fault and measurement noise. To this end, a cascade active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) strategy with a two-stage Kalman filter (TSKF) is proposed. The TSKF can estimate the loss-of-effectiveness fault factor and the state of the UAV in a noisy environment. Considering that unknown disturbance will influence the estimation accuracy of the TSKF, an extended state observer (ESO) is designed in the ADRC controller to further compensate for the influence of the factor estimation error. In addition, the convergence of the ESO and the stability of the closed-loop system are analyzed. Finally, the proposed strategy is compared with several traditional control methods in the simulation experiments. The simulation results show that the proposed strategy has good stability and disturbance rejection performance, and it has a clear potential in the application of the UAV flight control.