An experimental analysis of a robust event triggered super twisting sliding mode control for Quadcopter trajectory tracking

Abstract

An event-triggered-super twisting sliding mode control (ET-STSMC) with saturation function in reaching law have been designed for a nonlinear Quadcopter model with bounded disturbance and its performance is compared with Event Triggered-Sliding mode control (ET-SMC). Simulation results have been obtained for altitude and attitude tracking, demonstrating the stability of the closed-loop system with the proposed control. The event-triggering conditions are derived based on the Lyapunov method, ensuring non-accumulation of inter-event execution time. Experiments have been performed in real-time to analyse the robustness and computational cost in terms of the number of control updates of the proposed control strategy under normal flight, external disturbances, and parameter uncertainty. Simulation and experimental results show that ET-STSMC can achieves better tracking performance and robustness with reduced computational cost compared to ET-SMC during all flight conditions.