Fault Tolerant Control of Drone Interceptors Using Command Filtered Backstepping and Fault Weighting Dynamic Control Allocation

• Published in: Drones (Basel) Vol. 7; no. 2; p. 106
• Main Authors: Xu, Biao, Ma, Qingfeng, Feng, Jianxin, Zhang, Jinpeng
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI AG 01.02.2023
• Subjects: Actuators; Algorithms; command filtered backstepping; Control algorithms; Control systems design; Control theory; Cooperation; Design; Design and construction; Drone aircraft; drone interceptor; Drones; Dynamic control; dynamic control allocation; Fault tolerance; fault tolerant control; Fixed wings; Flight control systems; Interceptors; Linear programming; Methods; Nonlinear control; quantization error; reaction control system; Systems design; Unmanned aerial vehicles; Weighting; China
• ISSN: 2504-446X; 2504-446X
• DOI: 10.3390/drones7020106

This paper proposes a fault tolerant control strategy for drone interceptors with fixed wings and reaction jets subject to actuator faults. The drone interceptors have both continuous and discrete actuators, which pose a challenge to the control system design. The proposed fault tolerant control system consists of two parts, a nonlinear virtual control law and a dynamic control allocator. To deal with system uncertainty and quantization error, a virtual control law with a parameter update law is designed by command filtered backstepping. Then, a fault weighting dynamic control allocation algorithm is developed to distribute the virtual control signal to the actuators on the drone interceptor. When an actuator fault occurs, the proposed fault weighting dynamic control allocation scheme can redistribute the control signals to the remaining actuators. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is confirmed by numerical simulation.