A Comparative Analysis Between Sliding Mode Control and Super Twisting Sliding Mode Control Applied on a Quadcopter

The use of quadcopters has grown exponentially in countless fields. With the ever-growing demand for automation in today’s world, algorithms for the autonomous control of drones have become a major area of research. In this paper, we implement two control strategies, namely Sliding Mode Control (SMC) and Super Twisting Sliding Mode Control (STSMC), on a 6 Degree of Freedom quadcopter model and compare their performance. Using Fast Fourier Transforms, the two controllers are analysed to enable an effective comparison of the chattering in the control input by defining a suitable index. With this index, we observe a decrease of two orders of magnitude in the chattering present in the input given by the STSMC controller.