Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present an actuator fault detection method for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) based on interval observer and extended state observer. Design/methodology/approach The proposed algorithm has very little model dependency. Therefore, a six-degree-of-freedom linear equation of UAVs is first established, and then, combined with actuator failure and external disturbances in flight control, a steering gear model with actuator failure (such as stuck bias and invalidation) is designed. Meanwhile, an extended state observer is designed for fault detection. Moreover, a fault detection scheme based on interval observer is designed by combining fault and disturbances. Findings The method is testified on the extended state observer and the interval observer under the failure of the steering gear and bounded disturbances. The simulation results show that the two types of fault detection schemes designed can successfully detect various types of faults and have high sensitivity. Originality/value This research paper studies the failure detection scheme of the UAVs' actuator. The fault detection scheme in this paper has better performance on actuator faults and bounded disturbances than using regular fault detection schemes.