Robust Trajectory Tracking Control for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle with Actuator Faults

In this paper, an extended state observer (ESO)-based sliding mode tracking control method is designed for the quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with external disturbances and actuator faults. Firstly, the nonlinear model of the quadrotor UAV is established. Then the ESO is constructed to tackle the unknown differentiable disturbances and the sliding mode control technique is combined with adaptive estimation to address the unknown nondifferentiable actuator faults, respectively. Finally, a robust fault-tolerant tracking control method is proposed to make sure that all closed-loop system errors are uniformly ultimate bounded via Lyapunov stability analysis, and the efficiency of the proposed approach is confirmed by the numerical simulation.