Robust adaptive sliding mode control design for quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle trajectory tracking

The quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) systems have been getting more focus recently from researchers and engineers due to their outstanding impact and wide range of applications either in civilian or military. In this article, the sliding mode controller has been designed to control the attitude of the quadrotor as the inner loop controller. The major aim in this research is to reduce the chattering associated with the conventional sliding mode control (SMC), by implementing the adaptive fuzzy gain scheduling SMC technique (AFGS-SMC). Meanwhile, the performance of the proposed control has been evaluated in the presence of the model parameters uncertainty. The PD controller has been implemented as an outer loop controller to control the quadrotor position and supply the inner loop proposed controller (AFGS-SMC) with the desired generated quadrotor's attitude. Finally, the performance of the proposed AFGS-SMC controller has been evaluated by simulation in Matlab/Simulink platform, and compared with the classical SMC, in terms of chattering attenuation and robust trajectory tracking in the presence of the parameter uncertainty in the mass of the quadrotor UAV.