Integral terminal sliding mode fault tolerant control of quadcopter UAV systems

Abstract The article presents an active fault-tolerant control scheme with an integral terminal sliding mode controller for the UAV systems. This scheme effectively addresses saturation issues, disturbances, and sensor and actuator faults. Initially, the quadcopter UAV's model is represented in state space form. Subsequently, an augmented system incorporating auxiliary states from sensor faults is developed. An adaptive sliding mode observer is proposed for estimating the actuator and sensor faults. The integral terminal sliding mode fault-tolerant control, designed for altitude and attitude regulation, relies on fault estimation data. In contrast, a cascade proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller is employed for position control. Simulation results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over existing control algorithms.