Robust attitude fault-tolerant control for unmanned autonomous helicopter with flapping dynamics and actuator faults

In this paper, an adaptive robust fault-tolerant control scheme is developed for attitude tracking control of a medium-scale unmanned autonomous helicopter with rotor flapping dynamics, external unknown disturbances and actuator faults. For the convenience of control design, the actuator dynamics with respect to the tail rotor are introduced. The adaptive fault observer and robust item are employed to observe the actuator faults and eliminate the effect of external disturbances, respectively. A backstepping-based robust fault-tolerant control scheme is designed with the aim of obtaining satisfactory tracking performance and closed-loop system stability is proved via Lyapunov analysis, which guarantees the convergence of all closed-loop system signals. Simulation results are given to show the effectiveness of the proposed control method.