Fault-Tolerant Control Design for Multirotor UAVs Formation Flight

—This paper proposes the use of the Gbest-Guided Artificial Bee Colony (GABC) algorithm to solve an online optimization problem for the leaderless distributed formation control of hexarotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The GABC is employed to optimize a cost function for each agent while ensuring the convergence of the fleet to the target position and averting both obstacles and collisions with other UAVs. The GABC algorithm has been shown to be competitive with some other conventional biological-inspired algorithms such as the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). Fault-Tolerant Control (FTC) methods are presented and tested on several scenarios, particularly we considered the cases of loss of agents and actuator faults in the fleet. Results show the success of the proposed FTC methods to minimize the faults effect on the formation final goal.