Adaptive Super-Twisting Controller Design for Accurate Trajectory Tracking Performance of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

In this article, an adaptive super-twisting controller is designed for an agile maneuvering quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to achieve accurate trajectory tracking in the presence of external disturbances. A cascaded control architecture is designed to determine the desired accelerations using the proposed controller and subsequently used to compute the desired orientation and angular rates. Finite-time convergence to the sliding surfaces and closed-loop system stability are analytically proven. Furthermore, the restrictive assumption on the upper bound of the disturbance is relaxed by designing a gain adaptation law and low-pass filtering of the estimated equivalent control. The proper selection of design parameters is discussed in detail. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is evaluated by high-fidelity software-in-the-loop (SITL) simulations and validated by experimental studies.