Robust fault-tolerant formation control for tail-sitters in aggressive flight mode transitions

In this paper, the fault-tolerant time-varying formation control problem for a group of tail-sitters with multiple actuator faults and uncertainties is studied. A robust distributed fault-tolerant formation control strategy is developed to achieve aggressive time-varying formation flying in flight mode transitions. For each tail-sitter, the designed controller can be divided into an inner attitude controller and an outer position controller to govern the rotational and translational motions, respectively. The information of the actuator faults does not need to be identified online and the tracking errors of the global closed-loop control system can converge into a given neighborhood of the origin in a finite time. Simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy.