Trajectory tracking control of quadrotor UAV with uncertainties and actuator saturation: An event driven approach

This article presents an event driven mechanism in order to develop an altitude and attitude tracking controller for quadrotor type unmanned aerial vehicles (QUAV) with model uncertainties, disturbances and actuator saturation. A compensation system is introduced and implemented in order to overcome the input constraints and simplify the controller design process. Then, a nonsingular terminal sliding surface is defined to achieve finite time reaching to the desired trajectories in presence of unknown disturbances and uncertainties and motor angular speed limit. Additionally in order to avoid frequent periodic control signal transmission, event based triggering mechanism is implemented for the designed Terminal Sliding Mode Control (TSMC) law. The Lyapunov technique ensures tracking of the desired dynamics in finite time in case of event based TSMC implementation. It has been demonstrated that a positive lower constraint exists for the inter-sample time in order to prevent Zeno behavior. The efficiency of the control scheme is investigated using numerical simulations for quadrotor system. Simulation results show that the suggested control scheme ensure finite time trajectory tracking performance with less control update thus minimizing resource usage.