Quadrotor Fault Tolerant Incremental Sliding Mode Control driven by Sliding Mode Disturbance Observers

Abstract

This paper proposes an Incremental Sliding Mode Control driven by Sliding Mode Disturbance Observers (INDI-SMC/SMDO), with application to a quadrotor fault tolerant control problem. By designing the SMC/SMDO based on the control structure of the sensor-based Incremental Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion (INDI), instead of the model-based Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion (NDI) in the literature, the model dependency of the controller and the uncertainties in the closed-loop system are simultaneously reduced. This allows INDI-SMC/SMDO to passively resist a wider variety of faults and external disturbances using continuous control inputs with lower control and observer gains. When applied to a quadrotor, both numerical simulations and real-world flight tests demonstrate that INDI based SMC/SMDO has better performance and robustness over NDI based SMC/SMDO, in the presence of model uncertainties, wind disturbances, and sudden actuator faults. Moreover, the implementation process is simplified because of the reduced model dependency and smaller uncertainty variations of INDI-SMC/SMDO. Therefore, the proposed control method can be easily implemented to improve the performance and survivability of quadrotors in real life.

Adaptive Terminal Sliding Mode Control for Attitude and Position Tracking Control of Quadrotor UAVs in the Existence of External Disturbance

“…But, in this article, the influence of external disturbances has been reduced. An incremental SMC based on the disturbance observer has been designed for UAVs with the aim of fault tolerant in [59]. A novel fractional-order back-stepping based on the SMC for tracking control of UAV has been presented in [60].…”

Incremental Sliding Mode Control for Aeroelastic Launch Vehicles with Propellant Slosh

“…Although the nominal model is needed in ν, using Eqs. (18) and (20), it can be seen that C T = [c θ , 0, c 1 , 0, ..., c ns , 0], which actually does not contain any model information.…”

“…Real-world quadrotor flight tests also demonstrated the effectiveness and easy implementation of INDI-SMC. 20 Furthermore, INDI-SMC can achieve high-order sliding modes with finite-time convergence. 21 More importantly, as compared to the conventional model-based SMC designs in literature, the control model dependency and sliding mode control/observer gains are simultaneously reduced in the INDI-SMC framework.…”

“…This paper has two theoretical contributions as compared to the INDI-SMC designs in literature: 19,20 first, by exploiting the null space, the sliding surface designed in this paper ensures the robustness of the controller against unmatched uncertainties; second, this paper presents the design and Lyapunov-based stability proofs of INDI-SMC for under-actuated dynamic systems. Furthermore, the presented theories are validated by applying INDI-SMC to a command tracking problem of an aeroelastic launch vehicle with propellant slosh.…”

Incremental Nonlinear Fault-Tolerant Control of a Quadrotor With Complete Loss of Two Opposing Rotors

“…However, they suffer more from actuator damages due to a lack of actuator redundancy. Partial damage on the rotors could result in the reduction of control effectiveness, which has been extensively studied in the literature (e.g., [1], [2], [3], [4]). A more challenging problem is the complete loss of one or more rotors (Fig.…”