Attitude controller design of mini-unmanned aerial vehicles using fuzzy sliding-mode control degraded by white noise interference

This work addresses an attitude controller design using a fuzzy sliding-mode controller, which is mainly composed of the sliding-mode controller and the fuzzy inference mechanism, for a mini-unmanned aerial vehicle (mini-UAV) with propellers, to follow the predetermined trajectory. In this study, a fuzzy sliding-mode controller with a sliding surface vector is proposed, such that a simple fuzzy inference mechanism is adopted with centre of membership functions to estimate the upper bound of lumped uncertainty. Accordingly, the attitude trajectory tracking control using the proposed control strategy is illustrated while a mini-UAV is flying. Finally, the authors use the Lyapunov stability theory to achieve the stability analysis of the overall attitude tracking system degraded by white noise interference. Extensive simulation results are obtained to validate the effectiveness of the fuzzy sliding-mode controller.