Robust tracking control of quadrotor via on‐policy adaptive dynamic programming

Abstract This article is concerned with the tracking control problem of quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with external disturbance. The aim of this article is to develop a robust control algorithm based on super‐twisting algorithm and adaptive dynamic programming (ADP), which drives the tracking errors of quadrotor UAV to zero. First, the adaptive terminal sliding mode disturbance observer is developed for estimating the external disturbance with unknown upper bound. Second, based on the estimation of disturbance, the super‐twisting compensation controller is constructed to eliminate the effect of the disturbance estimation error and obtain the nominal error dynamics. Then, nominal controller via ADP method is used to force the states of nominal system convergence to zero. Finally, the efficiency of the proposed method is illustrated by numerical simulations and experimental verification.