Optimised trajectory tracking control for quadrotors based on an improved beetle antennae search algorithm

Abstract

This paper focuses on the trajectory tracking of quadrotors under bounded external disturbances. An optimised robust controller is proposed to drive the position and attitude of a quadrotor converge to their references quickly. At first, nonsingular fast terminal sliding mode control is developed, which can guarantee not only the stability but also finite-time convergence of the closed-loop system. As the parameters of the designed controllers play a vital role for control performance, an improved beetle antennae search algorithm is proposed to optimise them. By employing the historical information of the beetle's antennae and dynamically updating the step size as well as the range of its searching, the optimising is accelerated considerably to ensure the efficiency of the quadrotor control. The superiority of the proposed control scheme is demonstrated by simulation experiments, from which one can see that both the error and the overshooting of the trajectory tracking are reduced effectively.