LPV sliding mode fault tolerant control of an octorotor using fixed control allocation

This paper presents a fault tolerant control scheme for an octorotor using LPV based sliding mode control allocation. The scheme utilizes a combination of sliding mode methods and fixed 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 range of operating conditions. The proposed scheme takes full advantage of the `redundant´ rotors when faults/failures occur, without requiring any FDI (or any information about the faults/failures). Furthermore, the proposed scheme is simple as it does not require the baseline sliding mode controller to be reconfigured. To highlight the efficacy of the proposed scheme, simulation results on a nonlinear octorotor model for various fault/failure scenarios with gust conditions are presented.