Sliding-mode fault-tolerant control of the six-rotor UAV with dead-zone-input under event-triggered mechanism

This paper investigates the problem of event-triggered mechanism(ETM)-based sliding-mode fault-tolerant control (FTC) for a six-rotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) with dead zone input (DZI) cases, considering potential actuator and sensor faults. Initially, a dynamic ETM is designed, followed by the development of a non-fragile observer utilizing this designed ETM. An integral sliding surface (SS) is then designed in the observation space, and the system is augmented and treated as a variable time delay system. Subsequently, sufficient conditions to ensure the stability of the augmented system with an H∞ performance index γ are obtained using the Lyapunov-Krasovskii function. Next, a sliding mode control (SMC) law is formulated to guide the sliding variables to the SS in finite time. Furthermore, sufficient conditions for ensuring system stability with an H∞ performance index γ are decoupled, and the calculation methods for the non-fragile observer gain matrix and the sliding mode gain matrix are obtained. Finally, to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method in this paper, simulation experiments are conducted. •Considering the existence of dead zone input problem in the control system of a six-rotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, a sliding mode fault-tolerant control law that can compensate for dead zone input is designed based on a non-fragile observer, and a sliding mode fault-tolerant control framework for a six-rotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle based on event-triggered mechanism is established.•Considering the variable time-lag state observation system obtained by combining the dynamic event-triggered mechanism proposed in this work, a new integral-type sliding surface is designed in the state observation space. Compared with the conventional sliding mode control method, the method proposed in this paper not only has smaller system chattering but also enables the sliding variables to reach the steady state in a shorter time.•In order to reduce the computational burden of solving the to-be-designed matrix during the design process, unlike the construction and design methods of linear matrix inequality in the existing methods, this paper constructs an linear matrix inequality with a smaller computational burden to solve the to-be-designed content, and eliminates the equation constraints in the sufficient conditions for the stability of the system by utilizing the matrix equations, which yields a better fault-tolerant control effect.