Research ArticleFault tolerant control based on interval type-2 fuzzy sliding mode controller for coaxial trirotor aircraft

•Modeling the coaxial trirotor having six rotors.•Design a robust fault tolerant controller•Proof the stability of the proposed controller using Lyapunov method

In this paper, a robust controller for a Six Degrees of Freedom (6 DOF) coaxial trirotor helicopter control is proposed in presence of defects in the system. A control strategy based on the coupling of the interval type-2 fuzzy logic control and sliding mode control technique are used to design a controller. The main purpose of this work is to eliminate the chattering phenomenon and guaranteeing the stability and the robustness of the system. In order to achieve this goal, interval type-2 fuzzy logic control has been used to generate the discontinuous control signal. The simulation results have shown that the proposed control strategy can greatly alleviate the chattering effect, and perform good reference tracking in presence of defects in the system.