Adaptive fractional-order back stepping control for tracking and estimation of moment of inertia matrix of a quadrotor

Quadrotors are suitable devices for carrying various loads horizontally and vertically. Nevertheless, wind disturbance and vibration of loads in the quadrotor may cause some change in the moment of inertia matrix which leads the quadrotor to deviate from its ideal path. In this paper, a back stepping-based sliding mode controller is designed for trajectory tracking in the presence of wind turbulence. Moreover, a new method is proposed for estimating moment of inertia matrix using adaptive control and by using fractional-order-based controller design, and it has been tried to improve the robustness of the controller and its performance against disturbances and uncertainties. Finally, the efficiency of these controllers against different types of possible states for inertial uncertainties is shown by performing numerical simulations. The simulation results show the performance superiority of the presented method against other methods that do not use fractional calculations or adaptive control.