Disturbance Rejection Attitude Control for a Quadrotor: Theory and Experiment

In this article, an attitude tracking controller is designed for a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) subject to lumped disturbances. Firstly, the attitude dynamical model of the quadrotor under external disturbances is established. Subsequently, an improved sliding mode control (SMC) strategy is designed based on the linear extended state observer (LESO). In this control scheme, the SMC will guarantee the sliding surface is finite time reachable and the LESO will estimate and compensate for the lumped disturbances. Then, the robustness and asymptotic stability of the proposed controller are proved by the stability analyses. Finally, three numerical simulation cases and comparative flight experiments validate the effectiveness of the developed controller.