Adaptive non-linear integral sliding mode fault-tolerant control allocation scheme for octorotor UAV system

This study proposes a new active fault-tolerant control (FTC) and fault estimation scheme for a non-linear octorotor system. The proposed method utilises the idea of an online control allocation (CA) scheme to fully engage the rotors redundancy based on the information from the fault estimation unit. The nominal performance is first achieved using non-linear dynamic inversion (NDI) technique and then to incorporate the robustness, an adaptive non-linear sliding mode control is united with a baseline NDI controller. The proposed method is used to attain the desired altitude and attitude tracking control of an octorotor system. Furthermore, to control the un-actuated states (called internal dynamics) of octorotor system, a separate integral sliding mode-based NDI controller is designed that provides the translational axes control by generating the desired roll and pitch commands. Simulations on the non-linear model of octorotor system validate the dominant performance of the proposed scheme compared to the existing methods in the literature.