A review on safety control of unmanned aerial vehicles with guaranteed performance requirements

Abstract

Nonideal conditions including disturbances, faults, and attacks may significantly threaten flight safety of unmanned aerial vehicles by exceeding the inherent flight performance envelope curve. To strictly constrain the performance perturbations against nonideal conditions, some promising guaranteed performance methods are primarily developed to increase the flight safety of unmanned aerial vehicles. This review gives a systematic overview of safety control methods for unmanned aerial vehicles with guaranteed performance requirements. The funnel control, prescribed performance control, and barrier Lyapunov function methods are first analyzed as three typical guaranteed performance methods. Next, the applications of guaranteed performance methods on flight control, fault-tolerant control, and attack-tolerant control of single unmanned aerial vehicle are detailedly analyzed and summarized. Moreover, by extending the guaranteed performance control design for single unmanned aerial vehicle to multiple unmanned aerial vehicles, the applications of guaranteed performance methods on cooperative control, fault-tolerant cooperative control, and attack-tolerant cooperative control of unmanned aerial vehicle swarm are further analyzed. Furthermore, some direct applications of these safety control methods with guaranteed performance in the aerospace field are discussed. Finally, some challenges and future research directions are presented for the safety control of unmanned aerial vehicles with guaranteed performance.