Cascade first and second order sliding mode controller of a quadrotor UAV based on exponential reaching law and modified super-twisting algorithm

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles have become a disruptive technology, which has experienced exponential growth in several applications. The control of these vehicles is a fairly wide area and the cascade PID controller is the most used in practice. However, this latter structure doesn’t ensure high performances in the presence of unmodelled dynamics, uncertainties and external abrupt disturbances. To that end, this work proposes a new method that consists of a non-linear cascade configuration of the variable structure control between first order sliding mode based on exponential reaching law and modified super-twisting second order sliding mode algorithm. The developed method is tested on simulation on a quadrotor system, the results obtained demonstrate good performance for trajectory tracking and as well as other non-linear controller options, it is robust against unmodeled dynamics and disturbances.