Fault-Tolerant Control Strategies for Aerial Vehicles

Fault-tolerant control strategies for aerial vehicles address the challenge of maintaining safe and reliable flight in the presence of component failures or adverse external conditions. These strategies integrate fault diagnosis, isolation and control reconfiguration to detect anomalies in sensors and actuators, then redistribute control commands or adapt control laws to compensate for degraded performance. Approaches range from passive schemes, which guarantee robustness through conservative design margins, to active schemes that explicitly reconfigure control allocation when faults are identified. Robust and adaptive control methods, particularly sliding mode control augmented with disturbance observers or neural networks, have proved effective in suppressing chattering while ensuring finite-time convergence. Model-based observers estimate fault magnitudes, enabling reallocation of thrust or control surfaces even under under-actuation scenarios. Advances in optimisation-based allocation and fast terminal sliding mode design have further enhanced performance under aggressive manoeuvres and unpredictable gusts. Collectively, these developments underpin safer inspection, search-and-rescue and delivery missions, as well as critical operations in congested urban environments.

Research from Nature Portfolio

No recent Nature Portfolio content available.

Fault-Tolerant Control Strategies for Aerial Vehicles publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in fault-tolerant control strategies for aerial vehicles across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Fault-Tolerant Control (FTC): A control framework that maintains system stability and performance despite component faults by integrating diagnosis, isolation and reconfiguration functions.

Sliding Mode Control (SMC): A robust control method that forces system trajectories onto a predefined manifold, offering insensitivity to matched uncertainties and faults.

Control Allocation: An optimisation procedure that distributes high-level control demands among redundant actuators or rotors, particularly after fault identification.

Under-Actuation: A condition where available control effectors are insufficient in number or capability, requiring specialised reconfiguration to maintain controllability.

Barrier Function: A mathematical construct incorporated into control laws to enforce state or performance constraints and ensure finite-time convergence.

References

1. Fault tolerant control of an octorotor UAV using sliding mode for applications in challenging environments. Annual Reviews in Control (2024).
2. An adaptive sliding mode fault‐tolerant control of a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle with actuator faults and model uncertainties. International Journal of Robust and Nonlinear Control (2023).
3. Adaptive Barrier Fast Terminal Sliding Mode Actuator Fault Tolerant Control Approach for Quadrotor UAVs. Mathematics (2022).