This paper presents a robust active fault-tolerant control (AFTC) strategy for quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that addresses actuator faults and external disturbances within a nonlinear system. Thus, this approach involves using a comprehensive nonlinear model of a quadrotor. In order to enable the simultaneous estimation of the system states and actuator faults, a nonlinear adaptive observer (AO) was designed. This observer does not require the conventional observer matching condition and it employs a LMI-based optimisation approach, which simplifies the design process. Building on this, an adaptive backstepping FTC (ABFTC) technique is proposed, which utilises an AO-based fault estimation (FE) to compensate for the actuator faults and an adaptive control law for estimating the external disturbances. Furthermore, an adaptive algorithm is integrated into the FE unit to decouple the disturbances from the actuator fault estimates. The stability of this closed-loop system is validated through the Lyapunov theory and the effectiveness of the proposed FTC strategy is validated through MATLAB simulations.
Active fault-tolerant control, Quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicles, Nonlinear adaptive observer, Actuator faults, External disturbances, Adaptive backstepping.
Abderrahim EZZARA, Ahmed Youssef OUADINE, Hassan AYAD, "Adaptive Backstepping Active Fault-Tolerant Control with Nonlinear Adaptive Observer for Quadrotor UAV Under Actuator Faults and Disturbances", Studies in Informatics and Control, ISSN 1220-1766, vol. 34(1), pp. 85-95, 2025. https://doi.org/10.24846/v34i1y202507
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