P.I.D. Based Sliding Mode Control of Asynchronous Multi-actuator Monocopter

A monocopter is a single wing, rotating, non-linear platform that has gained popularity recently. The agility and maneuverability of the platform depends largely on the number of actuators, among other parameters. This paper investigates the flight response of a dual motor + flap configuration monocopter, based on variation of the control signal allocated to the motors. Different scenarios are considered where the step response, waypoint tracking and trajectory tracking are compared for the different cases of control allocations considered. The contribution done in this paper is the implementation of Sliding Mode Control (SMC), which is a non-linear controller, on the monocopter platform. The sliding surface design of the SMC is done based on Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) terms of the error in states, which are driven by a saturation based signal from the controller. Simulation as well as experimental results processed through MATLAB suggest that a configuration with inner motor controlling the altitude and the outer motor controlling the cyclic motion provides with the least amount of oscillations, whereas, both motors controlling only the altitude result in the high settling time for directional control. The performance response and the root mean square error results also proved that PID-SMC’s performance is predominant over other controllers for positional control as well as trajectory tracking by monocopter.