Active Fault-Tolerant Control of a Quadcopter against Time-Varying Actuator Faults and Saturations Using Sliding Mode Backstepping Approach

Fault-tolerant control is becoming an interesting topic because of its reliability and safety. This paper reports an active fault-tolerant control method for a quadcopter unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to handle actuator faults, disturbances, and input constraints. A robust fault diagnosis based on the H ∞ scheme was designed to estimate the magnitude of a time-varying fault in the presence of disturbances with unknown upper bounds. Once the fault estimation was complete, a fault-tolerant control scheme was proposed for the attitude system, using adaptive sliding mode backstepping control to accommodate the actuator faults, despite actuator saturation limitation and disturbances. The Lyapunov theory was applied to prove the robustness and stability of the closed-loop system under faulty operation. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the fault diagnosis scheme and proposed controller for handling actuator faults.