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11 November 2026

22 Pages

Saturation-Aware Constant Power Reaching Law for Regularized Fast Terminal Sliding-Mode Fault-Tolerant Control of Quadrotor UAVs

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1
School of Astronautics, Northwestern Polytechnical University, 127 West Youyi Road, Xi’an 710072, China
2
Unmanned System Research Institute, Northwestern Polytechnical University, 127 West Youyi Road, Xi’an 710072, China
3
School of Aerospace Science and Technology, Xidian University, 2 South Taibai Road, Xi’an 710071, China
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.

Abstract

Rotor-efficiency loss and thrust saturation reduce the attitude moments a quadrotor can deliver, so fixed reaching gains may request unavailable torque. This study builds on fast terminal sliding-mode control and radial basis function neural-network compensation with a saturation-aware constant power reaching law. A consistently regularized sliding surface and neural adaptation are combined with fault-aware allocation and reaching gains scheduled by pre-clipping rotor-thrust margins. A weighted-energy analysis retains rotor clipping and establishes regional exponential stability for hover after the effectiveness estimate is updated to its true value, under the theorem’s assumptions. In attitude-control simulations of a damaged maneuver, the schedule matches the fixed-high peak error under exact-state feedback. With continuous correlated gyro errors, its mean paired integral attitude error is 18.42% below the high-gain result and 2.50% above the low-gain result. It also reduces actual angular-rate RMS during the final hold relative to high gains. These simulation results demonstrate a balance between fault response and noise sensitivity under the tested attitude-control conditions without retuning the gains.

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