Fault-tolerant control against actuator faults based on extended state observer for quadrotor UAV

Abstract

A model predictive control (MPC) strategy is devised to handle the issue of multi-actuators partial failure faults of quadrotor vehicles. Firstly, considering a quadrotor system with actuator partial failure faults and unknown disturbances, the quadrotor dynamics model is analyzed and established. Then, the MPC attitude fault-tolerant controller is devised to transform the issue of controlling the attitude angle of a quadrotor into a quadratic programming solution problem, and the extended state observer (ESO) is devised to evaluate the faults and perturbations, which highly and greatly improves the system’s suppression capability against disturbances. Finally, numerical simulation experiments demonstrate the scheme’s fault-tolerance to actuator faults and its ability to suppress unknown perturbations, while the results of semi-physical simulation experiments also prove that the method is effective and feasible.