Trajectory Tracking Controller Design for a Quadrotor Aircraft Based on Cascade Sliding Mode Control

Abstract

This study proposes a cascade sliding mode control (CSMC) method to achieve trajectory tracking control of a quadrotor aircraft in a finite time. Firstly, the quadrotor control system is a hierarchical structure consisting of position and attitude loops. A sliding mode control with fast double power reaching law and a nonsingular fast terminal sliding mode control method are introduced to guarantee that the position and attitude errors of all system state variables converge to zero in finite-time. Meanwhile, the sliding mode controllers are designed to eliminate the chattering phenomenon and realize the high tracking precision. In addition, a disturbance estimator and a nonlinear disturbance observer are respectively employed in the above two controllers to compensate external disturbances and parameter uncertainties to obtain a better disturbance rejection property. Furthermore, the stability of the overall trajectory tracking system is analyzed and the sufficient stability conditions are derived based on Lyapunov theory. Finally, Simulation results verify the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed control method.