Fixed-Time Optimal Fault-Tolerant Formation Control With Prescribed Performance for Fixed-Wing UAVs Under Dual Faults

This article aims to propose a novel fixed-time distributed optimized formation control scheme for fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles with uncertainties, communication link and actuator faults, and performance constraint. Firstly, the prescribed performance function is introduced to improve the steady-state and transient performances of fixed-wing UAVs system. Communication link faults are tolerated by utilizing the distributed leader state observer. Subsequently, with the objective of establishing optimal controllers for velocity and altitude subsystems, the reinforcement learning control method is employed. Simultaneously, an intermediate controller is constructed to tackle the difficulties in applying reinforcement learning to the fault-tolerant control scheme. In addition, new adaptive laws of fault factor parameters are proposed, which can make the fault-tolerant scheme align better with the concept of fixed-time convergence. Finally, fixed-time prescribed performance controllers for velocity and altitude subsystems are developed. The designed control algorithm can ensure that the velocity and altitude tracking errors converge to the prescribed region, and the simulation results further demonstrate that the proposed control strategy is effective.