Sliding mode attitude controller design of a small-scale helicopter

In this paper, a robust sliding-mode controller is proposed for a small-scale helicopter. The controller is designed by sliding-mode concept combining with an extended state observer. Sliding mode technique is adopted to derive the control law, and the extended state observer is applied to estimate the neglected items and disturbances. Together with these two approaches, attitude controller is designed to force the actual attitude to converge to the reference signals. Several simulations are carried out to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method and the results show that the proposed controller yields excellent performance and robustness.