Fault‐tolerant formation control of non‐linear multi‐vehicle systems with application to quadrotors

Abstract

This study is concerned with the fault‐tolerant (FT) formation control problem with a guaranteed performance for non‐linear multi‐vehicle systems subject to actuator faults. The authors consider a practical situation: the information transferred between adjacent vehicles is disturbed and each vehicle is interfered by stochastic disturbance and measurement noise. For each vehicle, a decentralised state observer and an adaptive fault estimator are designed based on which a novel cooperative FT control (FTC) protocol is proposed to drive all the vehicles to the desired formation configuration. Taking the system noise into consideration, the error dynamics are modelled by stochastic differential equations, whose properties are used for designing and analysing the Lyapunov function in the framework of calculus. It is proved that the formation error system is mean‐square asymptotically stable with a prescribed attenuation level in an sense by the proposed FTC scheme. The observer, estimator and controller gains can be obtained by solving algebraic Riccati inequalities. Finally, the theoretical results are illustrated by simulations and real experiments.