Sliding Mode Controller for a Quadrotor

Abstract

Quadrotor is one type of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) capable of vertical take-off and landing (VTOL). In this project, the well-established Sliding Mode Control (SMC) approach is studied and applied to a quadrotor to control the horizontal movement along the x-axis. The SMC design starts with appropriately defining a desired sliding surface containing the desired system dynamics on which the system states are expected to slide. System states will converge and reach the sliding surface by following the sliding mode control law thereby stabilizing the quadrotor position. Further, in order to suppress the severe chattering, a positive constant is introduced to the denominator term in the control law. A set of simulation studies are run to obtain relatively better values for this positive constant and the gain. Comprehensive simulation and comparison studies are then illustrated to show the improved performance over LQR control.