Vision-based trajectory tracking control of quadrotors using super twisting sliding mode control

A trajectory-tracking problem for a vision-based quadrotor control system is investigated in this paper. A super twisting sliding mode (STSM) controller is proposed for finite-time trajectory tracking control. With the help of the homogeneous technique, the closed-loop system is proved to be finite-time stable. In addition, due to the introduction of super twisting mechanism, the controller can restrain chattering effect of sliding mode control. On the other hand, a pose estimation through data fusion is proposed to localise the quadrotor. A Kalman filter (KF) is utilised to fuse the estimated pose from semi-direct monocular visual odometry (SVO) with data from inertial measurement unit (IMU). A number of simulations are carried out on MATLAB and physical engine simulator Gazebo. The results show that the proposed system controller has better performances in terms of robustness and anti-disturbance than the proportional–integral–derivative (PID) controller and the first order sliding mode controller. © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.