The problem of active fault tolerant control (FTC) of dynamical systems involves the process of fault detection and isolation/fault estimation (FDI/FE) used to either make a decision as to when and how to change the control, based on FDI or to compensate the fault in the control system via FE. The combination of the decision-making/estimation and control gives rise to a bi-directional uncertainty in which the modelling and fault uncertainties and disturbances all affect the quality and robustness of the FTC system. This leads to the FTC requirement for an integrated design of the FDI/FE and control system reconfiguration. This paper focuses on the FTC approach using FE and fault compensation within the control system in which the design is achieved by integrating together the FE and FTC controller modules. The FE is based on a modified reduced-/full-order unknown input observer and the FTC system is constructed by sliding mode control using state/output feedback. The integrated design is converted into an observer-based robust control problem solved via 1100 optimization with a single-step LMI formulation. The performance effectiveness of the proposed integrated design approach is illustrated through studying the control of an uncertain model of a DC motor. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.