Underactuated and strongly coupled Quadrotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (QUAV) systems often face challenges in formation control due to actuator failures, external unknown disturbances, and limited communication resources. To address these issues, this paper proposes a periodic adaptive event-triggered fixed-time fault-tolerant control method based on a disturbance observer. First, a dynamic estimation and compensation scheme for actuator faults is developed by combining boundary layer theory with adaptive control techniques. Next, a fixed-time disturbance observer is designed to accurately estimate and compensate for external unknown disturbances. Furthermore, considering the communication burden imposed by real-time position updates, a Non-Monitoring Periodic Adaptive Event-Triggered Control (NM-PAETC) mechanism is proposed to reduce communication resource consumption, while ensuring that the formation system maintains the desired attitude angles under the influence of actuator faults and external disturbances. The proposed method enables fixed-time formation control under limited communication resources, and the system’s convergence time is independent of the initial state. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Yao et al. (Thu,) studied this question.