Adaptive modified super-twisting control for a quadrotor helicopter with a nonlinear sliding surface

A robust flight control for a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle is addressed in this paper. An adaptive super-twisting control, a second order sliding mode control, is used to control position and attitude of a quadcopter. The controller reduces chattering, is robust to uncertainties and perturbations, increases accuracy and does not require time-derivative of sliding variables. A time-varying sliding surface is designed with a nonlinear function to provide varying properties of closed-loop dynamics and to improve control performance. The robustness and effectiveness of the proposed control system are demonstrated by simulation test.