Composite Hierarchical Anti-Disturbance Control of a Quadrotor UAV in the Presence of Matched and Mismatched Disturbances

Quadrotor helicopter is an unstable system subject to matched and mismatched disturbances. To stabilize the quadrotor dynamics in the presence of these disturbances, the application of a composite hierarchical anti-disturbance controller, combining a sliding mode controller and a disturbance observer, is presented in this paper. The disturbance observer is used to attenuate the effect of constant and slow time-varying disturbances. Whereas, the sliding mode controller is used to attenuate the effect of fast time-varying disturbances. In addition, sliding mode control attenuates the effect of the disturbance observer estimation errors of the constant and slow time-varying disturbances. In this approach, the upper bounds of the disturbance observer estimation errors are required instead of the disturbances’ upper bounds. The disturbance observer estimation errors are found to be bounded when the disturbance observer dynamics are asymptotically stable and the disturbance derivatives and initial disturbances are bounded. Moreover, due to the highly nonlinear nature of the quadrotor dynamics, the upper bounds of a part of the quadrotor states and disturbance estimates are required. The nonlinear terms in the rotational dynamics are considered as disturbances, part of which is mismatched. This assumption simplifies the control system design by dividing the quadrotor’s model into a position subsystem and a heading subsystem, and designing a controller for each separately. The stability analysis of the closed loop system is carried out using Lyapunov stability arguments. The effectiveness of the developed control scheme is demonstrated in simulations by applying different sources of disturbances such as wind gusts and partial actuator failure.