Attitude control of a quadrotor aircraft subject to a class of time-varying disturbances

Here, the attitude control of a quadrotor aircraft subject to a class of disturbances is studied. Unlike disturbances mentioned in most of the existing literature, the disturbance considered here is time varying and non-vanished. An extended observer is designed to estimate the disturbance by treating it as a new unknown state. Based on the estimation, a feedback controller with a sliding mode term is designed to stabilise the attitude of the quadrotor. Furthermore, to avoid the discontinuity of the control law caused by the sliding mode term, a modified sliding mode term is designed. The resulting continuous feedback controller makes the attitude error uniformly ultimate bounded. Theoretical results are confirmed by numerical simulations.