3D Trajectory Tracking of a Quad-Rotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle via the First Order Sliding Mode Control

Control design for multi-rotor aerial vehicles (MAVs) is quite challenging problem due to their nonlinearitles, unknown dynamics, parametric uncertainties, an underactuated property, a nonlinear coupling dynamics and external disturbances. This paper introduces a first order sliding mode control (FOSMC) for robust stabilization of an under-actuated quad-rotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) operating in the presence of external disturbances. The proposed FOSMC guarantees a finite time convergence of the system trajectories to the sliding surface. Obtained simulations show that the FOSM based approach improves robustness properties compared with the concurrent techniques, and enhance tracking performance of the quad-rotor UAV exposed to external disturbances.