A Fractional-Order Sliding Mode Controller Design for Trajectory Tracking Control of An Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

In this paper, a fractional-order sliding mode controller (FOSMC) is designed and applied to a four rotor unmanned aerial vehicle (Quadrotor) to perform trajectory tracking for different time-varying references. Because quadrotor’s nonlinear system dynamics are effected by external disturbances and parameter variations easily, the FOSMC is used as a nonlinear controller and utilized its disturbance rejection characteristics to keep quadrotor on desired trajectory as well as overcome parameter variations. In order to indicate the priority of the FOSMC, an integer-order SMC (IOSMC) is also applied to quadrotor for the same references. The experimental results show that FOSMC is better than IOSMC in terms of error elimination and is good at dealing with parameter variations occurred while tracking the desired trajectory