Active Fault-Tolerant Cooperative Control for Multi-QUAVs Using Relative Measurement Information

This paper investigates actuator fault-tolerant cooperative control of multiple quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicles (multi-QUAVs) under restricted communication conditions, where only relative output measurements are available. By appropriately transforming and scaling the control inputs and outputs of the multi-QUAVs, an observable subsystem is constructed. A decoupled fault estimation observer is then designed for this subsystem to estimate actuator faults and the leader’s input signal. Based on the fault estimation information and relative measurement information among QUAVs, a node-based active fault-tolerant cooperative control law is developed. This approach enables multi-QUAVs to achieve consensus-based formation solely relying on relative output information, even in the presence of actuator faults. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed active fault-tolerant cooperative control method is verified by simulation.