ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates a distributed fractional-order fault-tolerant formation-containment control scheme for networked unmanned airships. In the proposed control method, an interval type-2 fuzzy neural network is first developed for each unmanned airship to approximate the unknown term associated with the loss-of-effectiveness faults in the distributed error dynamics, and then a disturbance observer is proposed to compensate for the approximation errors and bias faults encountered by each unmanned airship. Moreover, fractional-order calculus is incorporated into the control scheme to provide an extra degree of freedom for the parameter adjustments. The salient feature of the proposed control scheme is that the composite learning algorithm and fractional-order calculus are integrated to achieve a satisfactory fault-tolerant formation-containment control performance even when a portion of leader/follower unmanned airships is subjected to the actuator faults in a distributed communication network. Furthermore, it is shown by Lyapunov stability analysis that all leader unmanned airships can track the virtual leader unmanned airship with time-varying offset vectors, and all follower unmanned airships can converge into the convex hull spanned by the leader unmanned airships. Finally, hardware-in-the-loop experimental results are presented to show the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method.
