Active fault tolerant control of quadrotor UAV using Sliding Mode Control

In this paper, an active fault tolerant controller using Sliding Mode Observers and Sliding Mode Control for fault tolerant control of a quadrotor UAV is proposed. The sliding mode observer estimates online the amount of fault injected in one of the quadrotor motors. The estimated fault information is then used to update the reconfigurable sliding mode controller responsible for the UAV control. Controller reconfiguration is done using two different methods, adding a control residue and scaling the controls by the amount of fault. The controller is tested in Simulink under partial loss of one motor speed actuator fault. Results demonstrated the effectiveness of the controller despite the lack of hardware redundancy of the quadrotor system.