This paper focuses on the robust attitude control of a novel coaxial eight-rotor unmanned aerial vehicles(UAV) which has higher drive capability as well as greater robustness against disturbances than quad-rotor UAV. The dynamical and kinematical model for the coaxial eight-rotor UAV is developed, which has never been proposed before. A robust backstepping sliding mode controller(BSMC) with adaptive radial basis function neural network(RBFNN) is proposed to control the attitude of the eightrotor UAV in the presence of model uncertainties and external disturbances. The combinative method of backstepping control and sliding mode control has improved robustness and simplified design procedure benefiting from the advantages of both controllers. The adaptive RBFNN as the uncertainty observer can effectively estimate the lumped uncertainties without the knowledge of their bounds for the eight-rotor UAV. Additionally, the adaptive learning algorithm, which can learn the parameters of RBFNN online and compensate the approximation error, is derived using Lyapunov stability theorem. And then the uniformly ultimate stability of the eight-rotor system is proved. Finally, simulation results demonstrate the validity of the proposed robust control method adopted in the novel coaxial eight-rotor UAV in the case of model uncertainties and external disturbances. This paper focuses on the robust attitude control of a novel coaxial eight-rotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) which has higher drive capability as well as greater robustness against disturbances than quad-rotor UAV. The dynamical and kinematical model for the coaxial eight-rotor UAV is developed, which has never been proposed before. A robust backstepping sliding mode controller (BSMC) with adaptive radial basis function neural network (RBFNN) is proposed to control the attitude of the eightrotor UAV in the presence of model uncertainties and external disturbances. The combinative method of backstepping control and sliding mode control has improved robustness and simplified design procedure benefiting from the advantages of both controllers. The adaptive RBFNN as the uncertainty observer can effectively estimate the lumped uncertainties without the knowledge of their bounds for the eight-rotor UAV In addition, the adaptive learning algorithm, which can learn the parameters of RBFNN on and then the uniformly ultimate stability of the eight-rotor system is proved. Finally, simulation results demonstrate the validity of the proposed robust control method adopted in the novel coaxial eight-rotor UAV in the case of model uncertainties and external disturbances.