Learning-Oriented Fault-Tolerant Control for UAVs with Time-Varying Fault Estimation

Abstract

The increasing deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in safety-critical applications has created a growing demand for control strategies that remain reliable in the presence of actuator and sensor faults. This paper presents a fault-tolerant control framework that combines constructive mathematical modeling, proportional--integral (PI) fault estimation, and learning-oriented control. A nonlinear quadcopter model is first developed using both the Newton--Euler and Euler--Lagrange formulations, from which a discrete-time linear model is derived for observer and controller design. A PI observer is then proposed to estimate actuator and sensor faults, with exponential estimation-error convergence established for constant faults in the absence of disturbances and ultimate boundedness established for slowly time-varying faults under bounded disturbances. The estimated fault signals are incorporated into an active fault-tolerant control architecture together with a Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) controller, which is trained using only the yaw channel and subsequently applied to improve closed-loop tracking performance. Numerical simulations illustrate the observer's estimation performance under constant and slowly time-varying faults, including bounded disturbances, and the tracking performance of the integrated controller under multiple actuator and sensor fault scenarios. The proposed framework combines model-based fault estimation with learning-based control to improve fault accommodation and tracking performance in UAV systems.