Position and attitude control of quadrotor MAV using sliding mode control with Tanh function

Abstract

This paper presents a Sliding Mode Controller (SMC) with Tanh function for position and attitude stabilization of a quadrotor micro aerial vehicle (MAV). Since this MAV weighs less than 0.1 kg, even minor changes in its environment will affect its performance. Hence a robust controller for position x, y, z, and attitude ϕ, θ, and ψ is required. The nonlinearity factor is used to construct the dynamic quadrotor model, and the Lyapunov stability function is then used to verify and guarantee the proposed control scheme. To evaluate the robustness of the proposed control method, the dynamic model was simulated in MATLAB Simulink both with and without external disturbance. In addition, the proposed control approach is compared to the PID control scheme in terms of integral square error (ISE). The results show that sliding mode control utilizing the tanh function has excellent performance and resilience against perturbation at par with PID.