Sliding Mode Control of a Quadrotor Helicopter

In this paper, we present a new design method for the flight control of an autonomous quadrotor helicopter based on sliding mode control. Due to the under-actuated property of a quadrotor helicopter, the controller can make the helicopter move three positions (x, y, z) and the yaw angle to their desired values and stabilize the pitch and roll angles. A sliding mode control is proposed to stabilize a class of cascaded under-actuated systems. The global stability analysis of the closed-loop system is presented. The advantage of sliding mode control is its insensitivity to the model errors, parametric uncertainties and other disturbances. Simulations show that the control law robustly stabilizes a quadrotor