Enhanced backstepping control for disturbances rejection in quadrotors

Abstract

This work studies the issue of quadrotor trajectory tracking control in presence of disturbances and model uncertainties. The paper starts by extracting the kinematics and dynamics models of the quadrotor. This results in the motion equations, which eventually serve as a blueprint for creating the suggested smart flight control scheme. Secondly, an enhanced backstepping controller (BSC) is developed and tested to keep the quadrotor tracking the desired trajectory both in steady state and in presence of disturbances. Finally, BSC beside two other controllers: sliding mode controller (SMC) and proportional derivative controller (PDC) are implemented in MATLAB/Simulink and the obtained results are compared and conclusions are extracted. Therefore, it is established that PDC is not robust to disturbances as noise will be amplified due to the derivative term. Whereas, although SMC is robust to parameter variations and disturbances; however, it is not continuous which may affect the actuators due to the increased gains which may saturate them. In contrast, BSC requires too many tuning parameters; however, it ensures Lyapunov Stability and does not depend on the system as it does not involve cancelling system nonlinearity. Moreover, BSC results are 10¹⁷ better than the results of the two other controllers.