Adaptive Super-Twisting Controller Design for Accurate Trajectory Tracking Performance of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

• Published in: IEEE transactions on control systems technology Vol. 32; no. 6; pp. 2126 - 2135
• Main Authors: Venkateswara Rao, D. M. K. K., Habibi, Hamed, Sanchez-Lopez, Jose Luis, Menon, Prathyush P., Edwards, Christopher, Voos, Holger
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.11.2024; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Adaptation models; Adaptive control; Adaptive super-twisting control (ASTC); Autonomous aerial vehicles; Closed loops; Control design; Control systems design; Controllers; Convergence; Design parameters; disturbance attenuation; Feedback control; finite-time convergence; Low pass filters; Parameter estimation; quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV); Quadrotors; Surface stability; Systems stability; Tracking; Twisting; Uncertainty; Unmanned aerial vehicles; Unmanned helicopters; Upper bounds; Vectors
• ISSN: 1063-6536; 1558-0865
• DOI: 10.1109/TCST.2024.3398293

In this article, an adaptive super-twisting controller is designed for an agile maneuvering quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to achieve accurate trajectory tracking in the presence of external disturbances. A cascaded control architecture is designed to determine the desired accelerations using the proposed controller and subsequently used to compute the desired orientation and angular rates. Finite-time convergence to the sliding surfaces and closed-loop system stability are analytically proven. Furthermore, the restrictive assumption on the upper bound of the disturbance is relaxed by designing a gain adaptation law and low-pass filtering of the estimated equivalent control. The proper selection of design parameters is discussed in detail. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is evaluated by high-fidelity software-in-the-loop (SITL) simulations and validated by experimental studies.