Attitude Tracking Control for a Quadrotor Aerial Robot Using Adaptive Sliding Modes

Resumo

This work is concerned with the design and analysis of the attitude control law for a quadrotor aerial
vehicle, under bounded external disturbances and model uncertainties with unknown bounds. First, the vehicle

rotational kinematics and dynamics are modeled in terms of well-defined Gibbs vector and angular velocity rep-
resenting the control errors. To tackle the problem, we propose a first-order multi-input adaptive sliding mode

control strategy based on an adaptation law for the switching gain matrix. This adaptive gain matrix is proved

to converge to its maximum bound and the existence of an ideal sliding mode is guaranteed. The main contribu-
tions are: 1) the geometric dynamic modeling in SO(3) for the attitude control error using Gibbs vector; and 2)

the extension of a switching gain adaptation law originally proposed for single-input systems to a more general
multi-input formulation. The method is evaluated by numerical simulations, using IMAV-M, which is a recently
deployed open-source flight control simulator for multirotor aerial vehicles (MAVs). In an ideal scenario, without
measurement noise (or estimation errors) and small sampling time, the method shows to be effective and easy to
implement and tune.