Prescribed-time fault-tolerant tracking control for quadrotor UAV with guaranteed performance

Abstract

During the actual flight of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), there are widespread actuator faults, system uncertainties and external disturbances, which bring significant threats to its steady flight. This paper studies the problem of prescribed-time fault-tolerant tracking control for quadrotor UAV with guaranteed performance. By integrating error reconstruction and dynamic adjustment strategies, this paper ensures that the position and attitude tracking errors converge to the preset performance range within the prescribed time. Furthermore, this paper utilizes the disturbance observer failure compensation method to simultaneously handle the multiplicative and additive failures of the actuator simultaneously, and presents a nonlinear observer-based adaptive strategy to estimate additive faults and unknown external disturbances acting on the UAV. Simulation results show that the position and attitude tracking errors converge to the preset accuracy within the prescribed time without actuator failures. When actuator failures occur, the attitude tracking error still converges on time, and the convergence rate of position error is minimally affected. Thus, the proposed control algorithm for quadrotor UAV is validated.