Design and experiment of adaptive modified super-twisting control with a nonlinear sliding surface for a quadrotor helicopter

Abstract

Quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle is a nonlinear system of 6-degree-of-freedom motion. In order to handle the nonlinearity that causes undesirable behavior, robustness of flight control has been studied. In this work, we consider the combination of higher order sliding mode control and nonlinear time-varying sliding surface for robustness and accuracy in tracking. An adaptive super-twisting control, a second-order sliding mode control, is utilized to compensate for the uncertainty and perturbation of a quadrotor system. A time-varying sliding surface is designed with a nonlinear function to provide varying properties of closed-loop dynamics and to improve control performance with energy consumption reduction. The proposed control system performance including energy consumption was compared among nonlinear adaptive super-twisting control algorithm, linear adaptive super-twisting control algorithm, and linear super twisting controllers, without and under wind disturbance. The robustness and effectiveness of the proposed control system are demonstrated by several times simulation and experiment using a quadrotor helicopter test bed.