Robust adaptive fault‐tolerant proportional‐derivative tracking control for six‐degrees of freedom unmanned aerial vehicles

Abstract

AbstractThis article presents a robust adaptive control scheme for six‐degrees of freedom (DOF) unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the presence of modeling uncertainties and actuation faults. The proposed control is in proportional‐derivative (PD) form, and is able to tolerate actuation faults yet ensure stability and transient performance without the need for the detail model information of UAV. Furthermore, the PD control scheme exploited adaptively self‐tuning PD gains, which avoids the ad‐hoc and time‐consuming trial and error process for gain determination as commonly required in traditional PD control, thus is design‐friendly and low‐cost, rendering the control algorithms easy and straightforward for programming and implementation. Both theoretical analysis and numerical simulation validate the effectiveness of the proposed control method.