Sliding Mode Observer and Control for Quadrotor Stabilization

In recent years, the development of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has brought about brilliant progression in many industrial fields. For UAV motion control, the most fundamental and core factor is the controller design for attitude stability. This paper focuses on the stabilization of a quadrotor. Quadrotor is influenced by external disturbances such as wind gust and meteorological changes. For these reasons, quadrotor has a modeling limitation in precision. In this paper, we propose a control method with the estimated three angles to follow the desired value for quadrotor attitude stabilization. We suggest the sliding mode observer (SMO) based attitude estimation model of a quadrotor. The configured error variable by SMO improves the estimation accuracy of the angles such as roll, pitch, and yaw. Using sliding mode control (SMC), moreover, we obtain the appropriate control input to stabilize the quadrotor attitude with the estimated angle based on SMO. Sliding surface that contains the desired angles is determined to reduce the tracking error. The performance and effectiveness of the proposed system are verified through a simulation result.