Adaptive Sliding-Mode Control of a Helicopter with Integral Switching Manifold

As the helicopter is a strong coupling and nonlinear system, the original mathematical model of helicopter is linearized first and a novel design method for the tracking control based on adaptive sliding-mode control is adopted. The pole assignment is used for the design of integral switching manifold and an adaptive algorithm is utilised to estimate the upper bound of uncertainties. The advantage of sliding-mode control is its insensitivity to the model errors, parametric uncertainties and other disturbances. Simulations show that the exponential stability is guaranteed for the tracking control and the robustness against external disturbance is obtained as well.