Adaptive robust control for quad-rotor based on a compound control method

This paper proposes an adaptive robust control (ARC) scheme for quad-rotor to track 3D trajectory subject to unknown external disturbances and parametric uncertainties. The proposed controller is based on a compound control method including back-stepping and sliding mode control (SMC). Back-stepping is implemented to handle the nonlinearity of the dynamic model, complementary SMC is used to compensate the effect of external disturbances, and adaptive control is applied to estimate system parameters like mass in real time. The asymptotic stability of the proposed ARC scheme has been proved by the Lyapunov stability theory. Numerical simulations in various cases show the effectiveness, adaptability and robustness of the proposed ARC compared with PID control and robust control (RC) without adaptive control law.