Guidance of quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicles via adaptive multiple-surface sliding mode control

In many application domains, navigation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) requires a planar flight to move along a desired path or to track a moving object under uncertain conditions. In this paper, we propose a robust control approach for quadrotor UAVs performing a nonholonomic-like navigation with a predefined velocity based guidance law. Specifically, the quadrotor model is first recast in the framework of nonholonomic systems, and then an adaptive multiple-surface sliding mode approach, with suboptimal second order sliding mode control, is applied. The robustness features of the proposed approach are discussed and assessed in simulation.