Robust adaptive control design for rotorcraft unmanned aerial vehicles based on sliding mode approach

Abstract

This paper presents a nonlinear robust control design method for a generic rotorcraft unmanned aerial vehicle (RUAV). The control objective is to let the RUAV track some pre-defined time-varying position and heading trajectories. The proposed controller employs feedback linearization process to realize the dynamic decoupling control and applies adaptive sliding mode control to compensate for the parametric uncertainties and external disturbances. The global asymptotical stability is proved via stability analysis. Compared with the cascaded controller, the proposed controller demonstrates a superior tracking performance and robustness through numerical simulation in the presence of parametric uncertainties and unknown disturbances.

Keywords

rotorcraft unmanned aerial vehicle (RUAV) / nonlinear robust control / sliding mode control / parametric uncertainty / wind gust disturbance

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