Novel robust super twisting integral sliding mode controller for a quadrotor under external disturbances

In this paper, a novel robust nonlinear control strategy for a disturbed quadrotor is proposed. The Euler-Newton formula is used to establish the quadrotor’s dynamic model with its external disturbances. The super twisting algorithm combined with the proportional integral derivative sliding mode control modified is designed to solve the problem of trajectory tracking and to stabilize the quadrotor attitude. The proposed controller based on the second-order sliding mode technique ensures the good robustness against the time-varying of the external disturbances solves the chattering problem and avoids discontinuousness of input signals in the integral sliding mode controller. The Lyapunov theorem is used to validate the stability of the rotational and the translational controller. In order to show the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed control, simulation results under different scenarios are presented. The proposed control strategy is compared to an integral sliding mode controller to demonstrate its superiority and effectiveness. © 2019, Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.