A Synthesized Design of Adaptive and Sliding-Mode Observer-Based Incipient Fault Detection for a Quadrotor

This study investigates the fault detection and fault estimation problem of a quadrotor with disturbances. A synthesized design of adaptive and sliding-mode observer is proposed to address the effective detection and estimation of incipient faults. First, the decomposed subsystems are obtained through the coordinate transformation, and the initial and incipient faults are separated from the disturbances. Second, an adaptive observer is applied to the decomposed unperturbed subsystem to estimate incipient faults, while the sliding-mode observer remains robust to disturbances for the perturbed subsystem. Lyapunov stability theory ensures the convergence of dynamic errors and the stability of the quadrotor system. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed synthesized algorithm of incipient fault detection is verified by the quadrotor simulation.