Fault Tolerant Controller Design for a Faulty UAV Using Fuzzy Modeling Approach

Abstract

We address a fault tolerant control (FTC) issue about an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) under possible simultaneous actuator saturation and faults occurrence. Firstly, the Takagi-Sugeno fuzzy models representing nonlinear flight control systems (FCS) for an UAV with unknown disturbances and actuator saturation are established. Then, a normal H-infinity tracking controller is presented using an online estimator, which is introduced to weaken the saturation effect. Based on the normal tracking controller, we propose an adaptive fault tolerant tracking controller (FTTC) to solve actuator loss of effectiveness (LOE) fault problem. Compared with previous work, this approach developed in our research need not rely on any fault diagnosis unit and is easily applied in engineering. Finally, these results in simulation indicate the efficiency of our presented FTC scheme.