UKF-based rotorcraft UAV Fault adaptive control for actuator failure

A new fault adaptive control methodology against the actuator failure is proposed in this paper. The actuator failure modeling are introduced to denote the actuator healthy level (AHL) and the Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) is employed for on-line estimation of both the flight states and the AHL parameters of rotorcraft UAV (RUAV). The functionality of the approach has been illustrated through experiments on the Shenyang Institute of Automation RUAV platform SIA-Heli-90 and the results show that the proposed method is an effective tool for actuator fault adaptive control of RUAVs.