On adaptive sliding mode control for improved quadrotor tracking
The tracking control of a quadrotor has been considered in this paper. The application of sliding mode control provides robustness against parametric uncertainties, but it requires knowledge of the upper bounds of uncertainties. An adaptation strategy has been proposed to implement sliding mode control, which does not require the upper bound of the uncertainties. The adaptive control law is derived on the basis of Lyapunov stability theory, which guarantees the tracking performance. The adaptation can be tuned faster by proper tuning, and convergence with good tracking can be achieved. The proposed adaptive method has improved robustness and provided simpler implementation. Through an illustrative simulation example, the performance of the proposed control method is presented and also compared with classical sliding mode control from the literature. It is demonstrated that the performance of quadrotor altitude tracking and convergence has been considerably improved while maintaining stability, even in presence of external disturbances and parameter uncertainties.