Fault-Tolerant Attitude Tracking Control Driven by Spiking NNs for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

In this article, we proposed a novel fault-tolerant control scheme for quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) based on spiking neural networks (SNNs), which leverages the inherent features of neural network computing to significantly enhance the reliability and robustness of UAV flight control. Traditional control methods are known to be inadequate in dealing with complex and real-time sensor data, which results in poor performance and reduced robustness in fault-tolerant control. In contrast, the temporal processing, parallelism, and nonlinear capacity of SNNs enable the fault-tolerant control scheme to process vast amounts of sensory data with the ability to accurately identify and respond to faults. Furthermore, SNNs can learn and adjust to new environments and fault conditions, providing effective and adaptive flight control. The proposed SNN-based fault-tolerant control scheme demonstrates significant improvements in control accuracy and robustness compared with conventional methods, indicating its potential applicability and suitability for a range of UAV flight control scenarios.