Fault tolerant control of an octorotor using LPV based sliding mode control allocation

Abstract

This paper presents an LPV based sliding mode fault tolerant controller for an octorotor. The scheme utilizes a combination of sliding mode methods and control allocation in order to deal with rotor faults/failures. An LPV scheme has been used to design the baseline sliding mode controller and a stability analysis has been provided for a wide coverage of operating conditions. The proposed scheme uses control allocation to take full advantage of the `redundant' rotors to redistribute the control signals to the healthy rotors when faults/failures occur. Simulation results on the nonlinear model for various fault/failure scenarios show no visible difference in comparison to the nominal fault free performance.