Continuous Sliding-Mode Control Strategies for Quadrotor Robust Tracking: Real-Time Application

The design of robust tracking control for quadrotors is an important and challenging problem nowadays. In this paper, a robust tracking output-control strategy is proposed for a quadrotor under the influence of external disturbances and uncertainties. Such a strategy is composed of a finite-time sliding-mode observer, which estimates the full state from the measurable output and identifies some types of disturbances. It is also composed of a combination of PID controllers and continuous sliding-modes controllers that robustly track a desired time-varying trajectory with exponential convergence despite the influence of external disturbances and uncertainties. The closed-loop stability is provided based on the input-to-state stability (ISS) and finite-time ISS properties. Finally, experimental results in real time show the performance of the proposed control strategy.