Direct self-repairing control of the quadrotor helicopter based on adaptive sliding mode control technique

A direct self-repairing controller based on adaptive sliding mode control technique designed for the quadrotor helicopter with actuator faults is studied in this paper. Without any fault diagnosis, such adaptive sliding mode-based fault-tolerant control is implemented to track the desired output signal, when any actuator of the quadrotor loses effectiveness. Moreover, the Lyapunov stability theory applied can guarantee the stability of the whole system and the convergence of the tracking error. Finally, the availability of the proposed method is verified by the numerical simulation and HIL (hardware-in-loop) simulation on Qball-X4 to ensure the tracking performance of this nonlinear system under both normal and faulty conditions.