Adaptive twisting sliding mode control for quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicles

Abstract: This work addresses the problem of robust attitude control of quadcopters. First, the mathematical model of the quadcopter is derived considering factors such as nonlinearity, external disturbances, uncertain dynamics and strong coupling. An adaptive twisting sliding mode control algorithm is then developed with the objective of controlling the quadcopter to track desired attitudes under various conditions. For this, the twisting sliding mode control law is modified with a proposed gain adaptation scheme to improve the control transient and tracking performance. Extensive simulation studies and comparisons with experimental data have been carried out for a Solo quadcopter. The results show that the proposed control scheme can achieve strong robustness against disturbances while is adaptable to parametric variations.