Octarotor fault tolerant control via dynamic surface control

In this paper we present a Disturbance Observer Based Control for an octarotor unmanned aerial vehicle, taking into account the actuator dynamics. The scheme is robust to the uncertainties of the model dynamics, the actuator dynamics and it can also manage the presence of actuator faults and failures. The control law is based on a combination of Back-stepping and Dynamic Surface Control, where the feedback linearisation change of coordinates is applied to part of the state space dynamics in order to avoid the explosion of terms. The distribution of the control efforts among the actuators is optimally provided by an allocation algorithm which minimizes the energy consumption even in presence of uncertainties.