Fuzzy Sliding Mode Tracking Control of the Quadrotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle with Unknown Disturbances

The quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (QUAV) is one of Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) autonomous aerial vehicles. More and more attention has been paid to the QUAV in recent years for simple mechanical structure and favorable control performance. In this paper, a sliding mode control framework is proposed to achieve the trajectory tracking control of the QUAV, whereby fuzzy uncertainty observer (FUO) is designed to estimate external disturbances and model uncertainties. As a consequence, the proposed fuzzy sliding mode control (FSMC) approach is able to handle system uncertainties and external disturbances simultaneously, and thereby contributing to better robustness. In addition to theoretical stability analysis, the robust performance of the proposed FSMC scheme is evaluated via numerical simulations.