Position and Attitude Tracking of MAV Quadrotor Using SMC-Based Adaptive PID Controller

A micro air vehicle (MAV) is physically lightweight, such that even a slight perturbation could affect its attitude and position tracking. To attain better autonomous flight system performance, MAVs require good control strategies to maintain their attitude stability during translational movement. However, the available control methods nowadays have fixed gain, which is associated with the chattering phenomenon and is not robust enough. To overcome the aforementioned issues, an adaptive proportional integral derivative (PID) control scheme is proposed. An adaptive mechanism based on a second-order sliding mode control is used to tune the parameter gains of the PID controller, and chattering phenomena are reduced by a fuzzy compensator. The Lyapunov stability theorem and gradient descent approach were the basis for the automated tuning. Comparisons between the proposed scheme against SMC-STA and SMC-TanH were also made. MATLAB Simulink simulation results showed the overall favourable performance of the proposed scheme. Finally, the proposed scheme was tested on a model-based platform to prove its effectiveness in a complex real-time embedded system. Orbit and waypoint followers in the platform simulation showed satisfactory performance for the MAV in completing its trajectory with the environment and sensor models as perturbation. Both tests demonstrate the advantages of the proposed scheme, which produces better transient performance and fast convergence towards stability.