Cooperative Control Reconfiguration in Multiple Quadrotor Systems with Actuator Faults

A cooperative control problem for a multi-quadrotor system with quadrotor actuator faults is investigated. In the fault-free situation, distributed dynamic surface control is employed to design the nonlinear cooperative controllers, under which the team of quadrotors can move together in a prescribed leader-follower formation to reach a common target point. Once the actuators of some quadrotors become faulty, fault detection and isolation (FDI) detects the faulty quadrotors which are forced to leave the formation safely. Meanwhile, formation reconfiguration is constructed to make the remaining healthy quadrotors select another formation to reach the target point. The collision avoidance is achieved in the whole formation reconfiguration process by using a potential function. Simulation results show the efficiency of the proposed method.