Supervisory fault tolerant control design for a class of unmanned aerial vehicles

Traditional fault diagnosis and supervisory fault tolerant control method needs a series of models or filters to isolate the current fault. This may cause the instability of the system due to the isolation time delay. This paper proposes a novel supervisory fault tolerant control scheme for a class of uncertain nonlinear systems with faults ranging over a finite cover. The proposed scheme only relies on a simple switching among a family of pre-computed candidate controllers without any additional models or filters to isolate the faults. The states are ensured to be bounded during the switching delay, which ends when the appropriate stabilizing controller has been selected. An unmanned aerial vehicle example is taken and simulation results are provided to show the efficiency of the proposed method.