Smooth Robust Control Applied To Quadrotor Landing

In this work, the problem of autonomous landing of a quadrotor on a vertically oscillating platform is addressed. A robust adaptive altitude control scheme is proposed to deal with the aerodynamic effect called Ground Effect. The robust part of the controller, named Smooth Sliding Controller (SSC), is based on a chattering alleviated smooth control signal. This work presents the first generalization of the SSC, previously designed for linear plants, for the class of nonlinear plants representing vertical dynamics of an aerial vehicle. The stability analysis assumes the vertical velocity is provided. The performance of the proposed method is illustrated by means of numerical simulations and experimental results.