Fault‐tolerant attitude tracking control with practical finite time convergence for unmanned aerial vehicles under actuation faults

This paper presents an adaptive attitude finite time tracking control algorithm for quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) in presence of actuator faults, input saturation and external disturbance. The dynamic model of the quadrotor UAV is characterized with quaternion representation. Subsequently, using nonsingular terminal sliding mode surface, an adaptive fault-tolerant finite-time attitude control scheme is proposed. Using Lyapunov stability analysis, it is shown that the proposed method is able to achieve practical finite time attitude tracking convergence in that the attitude tracking error converges to a small residual set within finite time and all signals of the closed-loop system remain bounded. The effectiveness of the proposed method is confirmed via numerical simulation.