Adaptive flight control for quadrotor UAV in the presence of external disturbances

Adaptive control is of interest in the flight control systems for its capability to enhance performances and reliability. However, it is also used for handling aerodynamic parameters uncertainties, modeling inaccuracies and external disturbances. When combined with the sliding mode control, robustness from general point of view can be improved. This paper adresses a direct adaptive sliding mode flight control for quadrotor attitude stabilization and altitude trajectory tracking where minimum phase and observability conditions are verified. Indeed, after the achievement of quadrotor flight dynamics under some assumptions, an adaptive sliding mode flight control algorithm is developed for perfect navigation conditions. In addition, a centered white Gaussian noise and some parameters uncertainties with respect to both of the quadrotor mass and inertia matrix are considered, respectively. In order to guarantee the global stability of the synthesized controller with the adaptation mecanism, Lyapunov theory is advanced. Numerical simulations are performed showing the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed adaptive control algorithm.