Neuro-adaptive fast integral terminal sliding mode control design with variable gain robust exact differentiator for under-actuated quadcopter UAV

Abstract In this paper, a robust global fast terminal attractor based full flight trajectory tracking control law has been developed for the available regular form which is operated under matched uncertainties. Based on the hierarchical control principle, the aforesaid model is first subdivided into two subsystems, i.e., a fully-actuated subsystem and an under-actuated subsystem. In other words, the under-actuated subsystem is further transformed into a regular form whereby the under-actuated characteristics are decoupled in terms of control inputs. In the proposed design, the nonlinear drift terms, which certainly varies in full flight, are estimated via functional link neural networks to improve the performance of the controller in full flight. Besides, a variable gain robust exact differentiator (VG-RED) is designed to provide us with estimated flight velocities. It has consequently reduced the noise in system’s velocities and has mapped this controller as a practical one. The finite-time sliding mode enforcement and the states’ convergence are shown, for all flight loops, i.e., forward flight and backward flight, via the Lyapunov approach. All these claims are verified via numerical simulations and experimental implementation of the quadcopter system in a Matlab environment. For a more impressive presentation, the developed simulation results are compared with standard literature.