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

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.