Optimized intelligent tracking control for a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle with actuator failures

Abstract

This work investigates the implementation of tracking control for a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle exposed to disturbances and actuator failures. Cost reduction in control processes is not usually considered in conventional control methods. To overcome this limitation, this work proposes an optimized intelligent control scheme that utilizes adaptive dynamic programming. Firstly, a critic-only structure is employed to learn the nominal control strategies, including two critic neural network update laws, lifting the persistent excitation condition. Subsequently, two specifically designed observers are developed on the radial basis function neural network (RBFNN) to reconstruct the disturbances and actuator failures and compensate for the nominal strategies. The observers achieve fixed-time convergence by employing the fixed-time update laws of the RBFNNs. Moreover, two variable vectors using the Gaussian error function are introduced to reduce the impact caused by the observation errors. Additionally, the superior performance of the proposed control scheme is validated through numerical simulations.