Point-to-Point and Trajectory Tracking Control of a Quadrotor-UAV Using a

Terminal Sliding Mode Approach: Trajectory Design, Controller Gains Tuning,

and Comparative Results

Roger Miranda-Colorado1, Luis T. Aguilar, Jose E. Brito1

a CONACyT-Instituto Politecnico Nacional-CITEDI, Av. Instituto Politecnico Nacional No. 1310, Nueva Tijuana, Tijuana, Baja California,
Mexico, 22435, rmirandaco@gmail.mx.
b Instituto Politecnico Nacional-CITEDI, Av. Instituto Politecnico Nacional No. 1310, Nueva Tijuana, Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico, 22435,

laguilarb@ipn.mx, jherrero@citedi.mx.

Abstract
This paper presents a terminal sliding mode control (TSMC) methodology for point-to-point and trajectory track-
ing control of a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle. The controller parameters were tuned using an optimization-based
methodology relying in the cuckoo search algorithm, for minimizing the amount of energy consumption. The finite
time stability analysis is developed using a Lyapunov-based approach. A comparative performance analysis between
the proposed controller and a sliding mode control (SMC) algorithm is given. The performance of each controller
is assessed under ideal conditions, and by including aero-dynamical disturbances and parametric uncertainties. Nu-
merical simulations show that the performance of each controller is enhanced when the reference trajectory is also
optimized, and the performance of the proposed TSMC controller is better than that of the SMC controller with respect
to its robustness against disturbances and its demand of amount of energy.
Keywords: Quadrotor, terminal sliding mode, finite time stability, unmanned aerial vehicle, cuckoo search
algorithm.

This work was supported by CONACyT Project Catedras 1537.

The authors declare that there is not conflict of interest regarding the publication of this paper.

Preprint submitted to Robotics and Autonomous Systems August 7, 2017