Prescribed-time fault-tolerant control for the formation of quadrotors based on fully-actuated system approaches

This paper investigates the problem of prescribed-time fault-tolerant control for the formation of quadrotors by utilising the fully-actuated system approach. Since not all quadrotors can directly access the virtual leader's state, a distributed prescribed-time observer is designed to estimate the state of a virtual leader. Leveraging this observer, a horizontal position controller that combines the fully-actuated system approach with the prescribed-time method, as well as altitude and attitude fault-tolerant controller, are proposed. In the design of control law, two distinct sets of controllers are designed: asymptotically stable controller and prescribed-time controller, each tailored to specific control objectives. The proposed distributed prescribed-time observer can ensure that the estimation error of the leader's state reaches zero within any specified time interval. Finally, the numerical simulation is conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed fault-tolerant formation control algorithm.