Robust Fault Tolerant Tracking Control for Unmanned Autonomous Helicopter with Disturbance

This study presents an adaptive robust fault tolerant control (FTC) scheme for the medium-scale unmanned autonomous helicopter (UAH) with external unknown disturbances and actuator faults. The nonlinear disturbance observer (NDO) is developed to cope with the external unknown disturbances and actuator faults. On the basis of backstepping and sliding mode control technologies, the adaptive robust FTC scheme is designed to make the tracking errors convergent. Lyapunov stability analysis indicates that the closed-loop system is stable and all closed-loop signals are uniformly ultimately bounded. Simulation results are carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.