Fixed Time Disturbance Observer Based Sliding Mode Control for a Miniature Unmanned Helicopter Hover Operations in Presence of External Disturbances

This paper presents a novel fixed time sliding mode disturbance observer (FTSMDO) based second-order fixed time sliding mode control (FTSMC) for small scale unmanned helicopter to do hover operations in the presence of external disturbances. Sliding mode control is insensitive to matched uncertainties but sensitive to mismatched uncertainties. The novel FTSMDO exactly estimates the total mismatched uncertainties effecting the sliding mode control performance. To counter the mismatched uncertainties a new sliding surface augmented by the total mismatched disturbance approximated by the FTSMDO is defined. The second-order FTSMC forces the system states to reach the sliding surface in fixed time and then on the sliding surface the system states exponentially converge to the desired equilibrium point. The control performance is compared with the disturbance observer based sliding mode controller (DOB-SMC) and shows superior performance.