Meta-Heuristic Optimization of Sliding Mode Control—Application to Quadrotor-Based Inspection of Solar Panels

In this paper, inspection of solar energy system is addressed using a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) system. The accurate positioning of the system on the solar panel requires a robust controller to precisely address the fault while ensuring stability. For this purpose, an optimized nonsingular terminal sliding mode controller (ONTSMC) is proposed. The control law is designed based on the derived quadrotor model. Particle swarm optimization (PSO) method is used to optimize the controller parameters. Also, the closed-loop stability of the controller is ensured using Lyapunov candidate function. The proposed optimized controller is simulated in MATLAB/Simulink to characterize the control performance. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control approach.