Event-Triggered Adaptive Fault-Tolerant Synchronization Tracking Control for Multiple 6-DOF Fixed-Wing UAVs

In contrast with most existing results concerning unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) wherein two-degree or only attitude/longitudinal dynamics are considered, this article proposes an event-triggered cooperative synchronization fault-tolerant control (FTC) methodology for multiple fixed-wing UAVs whose dynamics are six-degree-of-freedom (DOF) with twelf-state-variables subject to actuator faults, modeling uncertainties, and external disturbances. More precisely, an event-triggering mechanism is devised to determine the time instants of updating control signals, which reduces the signal transmission burden, while saving on system resources. The Zeno phenomenon is excluded in the sense of guaranteeing that the time between two consecutive switchings is lower bounded by a positive constant. The actuator faults as well as the network induced errors are handled via the bound estimation approach and some well-defined smooth functions. By strict Lyapunov arguments, all closed-loop signals are proved to be semi-globally uniformly ultimately bounded (SGUUB) and the synchronization tracking errors of speed and attitude converge to a residual set around origin whose size can be made arbitrarily small through selecting appropriate design parameters.