Adaptive sliding mode-based active disturbance rejection control for a quadcopter

Abstract

This paper presents an adaptive sliding mode-based active disturbance rejection control (ASM-ADRC) strategy for the altitude and attitude control of an unmanned quadcopter with disturbances. The quadcopter is an underactuated system subject to parametric perturbations, nonlinearity, unmodeled dynamics, strong coupling, and external disturbances. The proposed algorithm is based on the quadcopter’s dynamic model, where the effects of noise and wind are considered additive disturbances. The central concept is to combine the advantages of adaptive sliding mode control (SMC) to accurately track the reference trajectory with the ability of ADRC to reject the parameter uncertainties and external disturbances. The proposed control scheme is verified in simulation studies with sensor noise and external disturbances. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can significantly reduce the chattering phenomenon, owing to the estimation capability of the extended state observer (ESO). The proposed method also improves the robustness against modeling errors and disturbances and smoothly tracks the reference trajectory.