Development of a Fault-Tolerant Control System for a Swarm of Drones

One of the important challenges in an autonomous swarm of drones is the dependability of the swarm to continue its mission. Engine failure or propeller disintegration poses a significant risk to the operation of each node of the swarm and if it happens the system should be able to tolerate such malfunction by reconfiguring the swarm and reforming if it is necessary. In this paper, a fault-tolerant control system for an autonomous leader–follower based swarm of drones is presented. For defining the fault model, the full failure of an engine is considered as an emergency situation, and the controller of each node is facilitated to reconfigure the swarm from imposing a bottom-up reformation to bypass the faulty node, which keeps the formation intact as much as possible. The simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed technique with respect to reliability and robust stability.