Dynamic event-triggered neuroadaptive fault-tolerant control of quadrotor UAV with a novel cosine kernel

The fault-tolerant control (FTC) for trajectory tracking of a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has attracted researchers. The non-linear model of the UAV, coupled with model uncertainties, external disturbances, and actuator failures, requires the function approximation of the lumped non-linearity for controller design. One of the most efficient ways to approximate non-linearity is using radial basis function neural networks (RBFNNs). To date, RBFNNs have been formulated, trained, and used directly for function approximation, which requires considerable computation to derive the control laws. The proposed control and parameter estimation laws approximate the non-linearity by using RBFNNs indirectly. The proposed laws with virtual parameter estimation do not require the actual formulation of RBFNNs and their weights, thus saving on computational resources. For kernel optimization, the Gaussian kernels with exponential terms in RBFNNs are replaced by cosine kernels with algebraic terms, which shows faster convergence as per simulation results. To save on communication bandwidth, static event-triggering communication mechanisms (SECM) and dynamic event-triggering mechanisms (DECM) have been proposed. As DECM works on dynamically changing variables, it saves more communication bandwidth, as tested in simulation. Lyapunov stability analysis proves that errors are uniformly ultimately bounded (UUB). The performance of the proposed algorithm has been tested through numerical simulations, which show superior performance when compared with similar studies. The proposed algorithm has been validated in a real-time Gazebo simulator.