Distributed fault tolerant model predictive control for multi‐unmanned aerial vehicle system

This paper is devoted to the cooperative tracking control of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles with unknown faults. Considering the practical case that the unmanned aerial vehicles suffer from strong nonlinearities, external disturbances, actuator, and sensor faults, this brief investigates the distributed adaptive fault tolerant scheme for multi-unmanned aerial vehicle system within model predictive control framework. Firstly, for preparation to the fault occurrence case, the baseline model predictive control scheme is designed under fault-free case. Then considering the fault occurrence, a fault detection strategy is proposed by means of the moving horizon estimation and linearly parameterized approximation for actuator and sensor faults, respectively. Thereby with the characterized fault information, the fault tolerant model predictive control scheme is constructed by using an adaptive updating mechanism to compensate for actuator and sensor faults simultaneously. Finally, simulations well demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed control scheme.