Particle swarm optimization based sliding mode control design: Application to a quadrotor vehicle

In this chapter, a design method for determining the optimal sliding mode controller parameters for a quadrotor dynamic model using the Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm is presented. In particular, due to the effort to determine optimal or near optimal sliding mode parameters, which depend on the nature of the considered dynamic model, a population based solution is proposed to tune the parameters. The proposed population based-method tunes the controller parameters (boundary layers and gains) according to a fitness function that measures the controller performances. A comparison of the designed sliding mode control with two popular controllers (PID and Backstepping) applied to a quadrotor dynamic model is proposed. In particular sliding mode control shows better performances in terms of steady state and transient response, as confirmed by performance indexes IAE, ISE, ITAE and ITSE. © Springer International Publishing AG 2017.