The unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has been developing rapidly recently, and the safety and the reliability of the UAV are significant to the mission execution and the life of UAV. Sensor and actuator failures of a UAV are one of the most common malfunctions, threating the safety and life of the UAV. Fault-tolerant control technology is an effective method to improve the reliability and safety of UAV, which also contributes to vehicle health management (VHM). This paper deals with the sliding mode fault-tolerant control of the UAV, considering the failures of sensor and actuator. Firstly, a terminal sliding surface is designed to ensure the state of the system on the sliding mode surface throughout the control process based on the simplified coupling dynamic model. Then, the sliding mode control (SMC) method combined with the RBF neural network algorithm is used to design the parameters of the sliding mode controller, and with this, the efficiency of the design process is improved and system chattering is minimized. Finally, the Simulink simulations are carried out using a fault tolerance controller under the conditions where accelerometer sensor, gyroscope sensor or actuator failures is assumed. The results show that the proposed control strategy is quite an effective method for the control of UAVs with accelerometer sensor, gyroscope sensor or actuator failures.
Keywords: actuator faults; fault-tolerant control; sensor faults; sliding mode control (SMC); unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV).