Fault-tolerant Time-varying Formation Tracking Control for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Swarm Systems with Switching Topologies and a Leader of Unknown Control Input

Abstract

This paper studies fault-tolerant time-varying formation tracking control problems for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm systems with switching topologies and a leader of unknown control input. Both loss of effectiveness and bias fault modes are mainly considered. Firstly, a fully distributed fault-tolerant time-varying formation tracking control protocol is constructed with the adaptive updating gain and the neighboring formation. The proposed control protocol is independent of the information of the actuator fault boundary. Then the feasibility condition for formation tracking is given, and the stability of the designed controller is proved by constructing a reasonable Lyapunov function and solving algebraic Riccati equation. For UAV swarm systems with actuator faults and switching topologies, the followers can not only accomplish the given time-varying formation, but also track the trajectory of the leader. Finally, the simulation examples are given to illustrate the effectiveness of the theoretical results.