Sliding mode control design for the attitude and altitude of the quadrotor UAV

Abstract Recently, the quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) are attracting significant interest from researchers due to its widespread applications, which involve the civilian and military sectors. In this paper, a robust sliding mode control (SMC) algorithm is designed to stabilize the attitude and track the altitude of quadrotor UAV. The switching function in the SMC control law has been replaced by the error function to reduce the chattering influences. The chattering phenomenon is induced by the parameter uncertainties and external disturbances and results in critical issues, for instance, the vibration in the mechanical components. The simulation results of the traditional SMC and feedback linearization (FBL) are used as the benchmark to test and evaluate the performance of the proposed SMC, which proved that the proposed controller outperforms the traditional SMC and FBL controllers.