This paper is devoted to the cooperative tracking control of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles with unknown faults. Considering the practical case that the unmanned aerial vehicles suffer from strong nonlinearities, external disturbances, actuator, and sensor faults, this brief investigates the distributed adaptive fault tolerant scheme for multi-unmanned aerial vehicle system within model predictive control framework. Firstly, for preparation to the fault occurrence case, the baseline model predictive control scheme is designed under fault-free case. Then considering the fault occurrence, a fault detection strategy is proposed by means of the moving horizon estimation and linearly parameterized approximation for actuator and sensor faults, respectively.Thereby with the characterized fault information, the fault tolerant model predictive control scheme is constructed by using an adaptive updating mechanism to compensate for actuator and sensor faults simultaneously. Finally, simulations well demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed control scheme.

This paper studies the disturbance observer-based model predictive control approach to deal with the unmanned aerial vehicle formation flight with unknown disturbances. The distributed control problem for a class of multiple unmanned aerial vehicle systems with reference trajectory tracking and disturbance rejection is formulated. Firstly, a local distributed controller is designed by using the model predictive control method to achieve stable tracking, where the local optimization problem is solved by an adaptive differential evolution algorithm. Then, a feedforward compensation controller is introduced by using a disturbance observer to estimate and compensate disturbances, and improve the ability of anti-interference. Besides, the stability of the proposed composite controller is analyzed as well. Finally, the simulation examples are provided to illustrate the validity of proposed control structure.

No abstract

This article studies the adaptive model predictive control with extended state observers (ESO) to deal with multiple unmanned aerial vehicles formation flight in presence of external disturbances and system uncertainties. Specifically, to deal with the mismatch of predictive model caused by external disturbances and system uncertainties, ESOs are introduced to estimate the lumped disturbances, where the ultimately bounded property of observer system can be guaranteed by using the Lyapunov stability theorem. With these observations, the distributed adaptive model predictive controller is designed to achieve trajectory tracking and disturbance rejection simultaneously for multiple unmanned aerial vehicles, as well as taking the state and input saturation into account. Moreover, the stability of proposed model predictive controller is analyzed. Finally, the simulation examples are provided to illustrate the validity of the proposed control scheme.

This paper presents a dynamical recurrent neural network- (RNN-) based model predictive control (MPC) structure for the formation flight of multiple unmanned quadrotors. A distributed hierarchical control system with the translation subsystem and rotational subsystem is proposed to handle the formation-tracking problem for each quadrotor. The RNN-based MPC is proposed for each subsystem, where the RNN is introduced as the predictive model in MPC. And to improve the modeling accuracy, an adaptive updating law is developed to tune weights online for the RNN. Besides, the adaptive differential evolution (DE) algorithm is utilized to solve the optimization problem for MPC. Furthermore, the closed-loop stability is analyzed; meanwhile, the convergence of the DE algorithm is discussed as well. Finally, some simulation examples are provided to illustrate the validity of the proposed control structure.