This book studies selected advanced flight control schemes for an uncertain quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) systems in the presence of constant external disturbances, parametric uncertainties, measurement noise, time-varying external disturbances, and random external disturbances. Furthermore, in all the control techniques proposed in this book, it includes the simulation results with comparison to other nonlinear control schemes recently developed for the tracking control of a quadrotor UAV. The main contributions of the present book for quadrotor UAV systems are as follows:
(i) the proposed control methods are based on the high-order sliding mode controller (SMC) and hybrid control algorithm with an optimization method.
(ii) the finite-time control schemes are developed by using fast terminal SMC (FTSMC), nonsingular FTSMC (NFTSMC), global time-varying SMC, and adaptive laws.
(iii) the fractional-order flight control schemes are developed by using the fractional-order calculus theory, super twisting algorithm, NFTSMC, and the SMC.
This book covers the research history and importance of quadrotor system subject to system uncertainties, external wind disturbances, and noise measurements, as well as the research status of advanced flight control methods, adaptive flight control methods, and flight control based on fractional-order theory. The book would be interesting to most academic undergraduate, postgraduates, researchers on flight control for drones and applications of advanced controllers in engineering field. This book presents a must-survey for advanced finite-time control for quadrotor system. Some parts of this book have the potential of becoming the courses for the modelling and control of autonomous flying machines. Readers (academic researcher, undergraduate student, postgraduate student, MBA/executive, and education practitioner) interested in nonlinear control methods find this book an investigation. This book can be used as a good reference for the academic research on the control theory, drones, terminal sliding mode control, and related to this or used in Ph.D. study of control theory and their application in field engineering.