Fault Tolerant Predictive Control Based on Discrete-Time Sliding Mode Observer for Quadrotor UAV

An active fault-tolerant control scheme for a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with actuators faults is presented in this paper. The proposed scheme is based on model predictive control (MPC) and the discrete-time sliding mode observer. Considering the impact of disturbances on fault diagnosis, a discrete-time sliding mode observer with simple structure and strong robustness against the disturbances is designed to isolate the actuator faults and estimate the control effectiveness factors accurately. Using the fault diagnosis information, a model predictive active fault tolerant controller with embedded integrator is proposed to compensate parameter uncertainty and bounded disturbances in the realistic control system of the quadrotor. The advantages of the proposed control scheme are the ability of dealing with the control constraints, improving the fault-tolerant control precision and getting better real-time and anti-interference performance. The algorithm comparison experimental results on the quadrotor semi-physical simulation platform validate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.