Fractional Gradient Descent RBFNN for Active Fault-Tolerant Control of Plant Protection UAVs

With the increasing prevalence of high-order systems in engineering applications, these systems often exhibitsignificant disturbances and can be challenging to model accurately. As a result, the active disturbance rejectioncontroller (ADRC) has been widely applied in various fields. However, in controlling plant protection unmannedaerial vehicles (UAVs), which are typically large and subject to significant disturbances, load disturbances andthe possibility of multiple actuator faults during pesticide spraying pose significant challenges. To address theseissues, this paper proposes a novel fault-tolerant control method that combines a radial basis function neuralnetwork (RBFNN) with a second-order ADRC and leverages a fractional gradient descent (FGD) algorithm.We integrate the plant protection UAV model’s uncertain parameters, load disturbance parameters, and actuatorfault parameters and utilize the RBFNN for system parameter identification. The resulting ADRC exhibits loaddisturbance suppression and fault tolerance capabilities, and our proposed active fault-tolerant control law hasLyapunov stability implications. Experimental results obtained using a multi-rotor fault-tolerant test platformdemonstrate that the proposed method outperforms other control strategies regarding load disturbance suppressionand fault-tolerant performance.