Adaptive sliding mode control applied to quadrotors - a practical comparative study

• Published in: Journal of the Franklin Institute 2023-11, Vol.360 (16), p.11578-11599
• Main Authors: Villa, Daniel K.D., Brandão, Alexandre S., Sarcinelli-Filho, Mário
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0016-0032; 1879-2693
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jfranklin.2023.08.045

This paper presents a complete control architecture for the implementation of adaptive sliding controllers (ASMC) in quadrotors. Aiming into presenting a control solution for real-world scenarios, this paper presents a comparative study evaluating the advantages and disadvantages of the three most common methods to implement adaptive sliding mode controllers in quadrotors. Namely, two of the compared methods aim to reduce the SMC gains to ones that keep the tracking errors inside a user-defined bound, while the third method consists of obtaining the minimal SMC gain which permits the sliding mode to exist. To inspect the compared methods in realistic and harsh conditions, the three controllers are tested far from quasi-static motion and under severe disturbances. The quadrotor was subjected to disturbances such as stabilization under intermittent wind, landing precisely subject to wind-gusts, high-speed trajectory tracking while carrying an unmodeled suspended payload with a center-of-mass offset, and trajectory tracking with a damaged propeller. The performance of the analyzed adaptive sliding mode controllers was also compared to the industrial standard PID controller. Our experimental analysis demonstrates that, in face of such disturbances, one of the analyzed adaptive sliding mode controllers excels when compared to the others, and every ASMC excels when compared to the PID.