Robust adaptive recursive sliding mode attitude control for a quadrotor with unknown disturbances

Area of Science:

• Robotics and Control Systems
• Aerospace Engineering

Background:

• Quadrotor attitude control is challenged by model uncertainties, unknown disturbances, and sensor noise.
• Existing control methods like PID and ADRC have limitations in handling these complex dynamics.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose a novel robust adaptive recursive sliding mode control (ARSMC) strategy for quadrotors.
• To improve attitude tracking performance and disturbance rejection capabilities.
• To ensure finite-time convergence and zero attitude tracking error.

Main Methods:

• Introduction of a recursive sliding mode control (SMC) with a two-layer, integral, and fast nonsingular terminal sliding surface.
• Design of an integral sliding surface to eliminate the reaching phase.
• Implementation of an adaptive gain adjustment for estimating unknown disturbance bounds.

Main Results:

• The proposed ARSMC strategy demonstrated finite-time convergence for the attitude control system.
• Attitude tracking errors were shown to converge to zero.
• Simulations and experiments validated ARSMC's efficiency and feasibility against TC, PID, and ADRC.

Conclusions:

• The ARSMC strategy effectively addresses uncertainties and disturbances in quadrotor attitude control.
• The novel recursive sliding surface design and adaptive gain adjustment are key to performance.
• ARSMC offers superior attitude tracking and disturbance rejection compared to conventional methods.