Super-twisting adaptive control of a quadrotor

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel methodology for the design of robust and adaptive controllers tailored to unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The proposed control architecture integrates a Super-Twisting Sliding Mode Controller (ST-SMC) with an adaptive law to ensure high-performance trajectory tracking under model uncertainties and external disturbances. The ST-SMC effectively mitigates the chattering phenomenon, a common issue in sliding mode control schemes, while maintaining robustness to system nonlinearities. The adaptive component dynamically updates the control parameters in real time to compensate for unmodeled dynamics and parameter variations. The combined approach synergistically improves tracking accuracy and overall system stability. A rigorous stability analysis based on Lyapunov theory guarantees the convergence and boundedness of the control errors. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated through experimental laboratory flights in a sensor-enhanced environment. The results demonstrate that the two control schemes complement each other, achieving a robust strategy with high performance in the presence of parametric uncertainties.