Distributed bearing-based fault-tolerant formation control of fixed-wing UAV swarm with prescribed performance

This paper investigates the bearing-based fault-tolerant formation control problem for fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarms. To ensure safe and reliable formation maneuvering under loss-of-effectiveness and bias actuator faults as well as multiple system uncertainties, a cascaded control framework with prescribed performance is proposed. First, nonholonomic constraints and lumped uncertainties are incorporated into the UAV dynamics, and a prescribed-time observer is designed to estimate the lumped uncertainties within a user-defined time interval. Second, a hierarchical error transformation is applied to enforce user-specified transient and steady-state performance bounds on the tracking errors. Third, based on the uncertainty estimation and transformed errors, a distributed bearing-based fault-tolerant controller is developed to achieve the desired formation maneuvering behavior. The proposed method is rigorously analyzed for stability, and comparative simulations demonstrate its effectiveness and scalability under challenging conditions, achieving significantly improved performance metrics compared to existing approaches.