A Dual Adaptive Control Strategy for Quadrotor UAVs Under Model Uncertainties and External Sensor Disturbances

The model uncertainties and external disturbance are the main causes affecting the quality of quadrotor control. In this paper, a dual adaptive control strategy for quadrotors is proposed to overcome the above limitations, in which the quadrotor control process is considered comprehensively. Specifically, at first, an adaptive filter based on the recursive minimum error entropy criterion is utilized to ensure the accuracy of the information obtained about the position from the GPS and the angles from the Gyroscope transmitted to the controller, addressing the influence of non-Gaussian noise and outlier. The accuracy of the position and attitude information is crucial for the control performance of the quadrotor system. This signal processing step plays a vital role, as any inaccuracies in the input data can compromise the control performance, regardless of the sophistication of the controller. Subsequently, an adaptive backstepping sliding mode controller is designed, in which an adaptive tuning function is constructed to solve model uncertainty problems. Furthermore, the dual adaptive control strategy proposed has eliminated cross-influence between the channels and the chattering effect of the sliding mode control. Based on the parameters of quadrotor UAVs, simulation results have demonstrated the high performance of the proposed control strategy, in which the control efficiency is 93% higher than adaptive backstepping sliding mode control while backstepping sliding mode control loses its control effect when facing both of the above limitations simultaneously.