Second order sliding mode control for a quadrotor UAV

A method based on second order sliding mode control (2-SMC) is proposed to design controllers for a small quadrotor UAV. For the switching sliding manifold design, the selection of the coefficients of the switching sliding manifold is in general a sophisticated issue because the coefficients are nonlinear. In this work, in order to perform the position and attitude tracking control of the quadrotor perfectly, the dynamical model of the quadrotor is divided into two subsystems, i.e., a fully actuated subsystem and an underactuated subsystem. For the former, a sliding manifold is defined by combining the position and velocity tracking errors of one state variable, i.e., the sliding manifold has two coefficients. For the latter, a sliding manifold is constructed via a linear combination of position and velocity tracking errors of two state variables, i.e., the sliding manifold has four coefficients. In order to further obtain the nonlinear coefficients of the sliding manifold, Hurwitz stability analysis is used to the solving process. In addition, the flight controllers are derived by using Lyapunov theory, which guarantees that all system state trajectories reach and stay on the sliding surfaces. Extensive simulation results are given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed control method.