Real-time fault-tolerant cooperative control of multiple UAVs-UGVs in the presence of actuator faults

Abstract

This paper investigates fault-tolerant cooperative control (FTCC) strategy for a team of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) in the presence of actuator faults. When actuator faults occur in one or more of the UGVs, two cases are considered: 1) the faulty UGV cannot complete its assigned task due to a severe fault occurrence, it has to get out from the formation mission. Then, FTCC strategy is designed to re-assign the mission to the remaining healthy vehicles; and 2) the faulty UGV can continue the mission with degraded performance, then the other team members will reconfigure their controllers considering the capability of faulty UGV. Thus, the FTCC strategy is designed to re-coordinate the motion of each UAV-UGV in the team. FTCC problem is formulated as an optimal assignment problem, where a Hungarian algorithm is applied. Real-time experiments are presented in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed FTCC scheme in different fault scenarios.