Distributed Coordinated Control for Fixed-Wing UAVs with Dynamic Event-Triggered Communication

Compared with most existing results concerning unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) wherein two-degree or only attitude/longitudinal dynamics are considered, this paper proposes an event-based fault-tolerant coordinated control (FTC) for multiple fixed-wing UAVs such that the consensus tracking of velocity and attitude is achieved in the presence of actuator faults, external disturbances and modeling uncertainties. More precisely, as opposed to static event-triggered communication mechanisms, a dynamic event-triggered communication mechanism (DECM) is devised to schedule the connected communications while avoiding the unnecessary information exchanges among UAVs, which reduces the communication burden and saves on the network resources. Meanwhile, the Zeno phenomenon is excluded in terms of guaranteeing that the period between two consecutive triggering communication is lower bounded by a positive constant. Moreover, the actuator fault, external disturbance as well as model uncertainties are treated as the lumped disturbances and estimated via the disturbance observer technique. By strict Lyapunov arguments, all closed-loop signals are proved to be uniformly ultimately bounded (UUB) and the tracking errors of velocity and attitude converge to a residual set around origin. Finally, comparative simulations are presented to illustrate the superiority of proposed event-based control.