Fault Detection and Fault-Tolerant Cooperative Control of Multi-UAVs under Actuator Faults, Sensor Faults, and Wind Disturbances

Fault detection (FD) and fault-tolerant cooperative control (FTCC) strategies are proposed in this paper for multiple fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) under actuator faults, sensor faults, and wind disturbances. Firstly, the faulty model is introduced while the effectiveness loss, deviation of thrust throttle setting, and pitot sensor faults are considered. Secondly, the faulty UAV model with wind disturbances is linearized and the system is then converted into two subsystems by using state and output transformations. Further, cooperative unknown input observers (UIOs) are developed to estimate the faults, disturbances, and states. By combining with the observers' estimations, adaptive thresholds are designed to detect actuator and sensor faults in the system. Then, considering state constraints, a backstepping-based FTCC scheme is proposed for multiple UAVs (multi-UAVs) suffering from actuator faults, sensor faults, and wind disturbances. It is shown by Lyapunov analysis that the tracking errors are fixed-time convergent. Finally, the effectiveness of the FD and FTCC scheme is verified by numerical simulation.