Finite‐time control for a quadcopter UAV in the application of wildfire monitoring

This article investigates the problem of monitoring wildfires using a quadcopter uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) subject to external perturbations and nonlinear uncertainties. A finite‐time control scheme is designed for the quadcopter UAV to monitor the elliptical propagation of a wildfire. The control scheme is composed of an improved nonsingular fast terminal sliding mode control (NFTSMC) and a higher order sliding mode observer (HOSMO). The HOSMO is constructed first to estimate external perturbations, nonlinear uncertainties, and incomplete system states resulting from the system's uncertainties. Then, a novel NFTSMC is developed that utilizes the estimated system states. The Lyapunov theorem is used to demonstrate that the quadcopter UAV can elliptically monitor a wildfire, and the tracking error can rapidly converge to zero within a finite time. Comparative simulation results are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.