Design and Hardware Implementation of Autopilot Control Laws for MAV Using Super Twisting Control

In this paper we present the design and implementation of autopilot tracking control law for Micro Aerial Vehicle using the second order sliding mode approach. The inner loop attitude tracking control design is carried out using output feedback based second order sliding mode technique, to ensure finite time convergence of the tracking error dynamics. While addressing tracking control of a time varying reference signal, it is important to investigate the stability characteristics of the internal dynamics to ensure perfect tracking. This paper mainly addresses the output tracking control problem for a MAV and investigate the stability characteristics of the longitudinal zero dynamics during tracking. We have proposed a stability proof based on Lyapunov theory to analyze the stability of the MAV longitudinal zero dynamics during tracking. A nonlinear aircraft model obtained using aerodynamic derivatives of The Blackkite 300 mm wingspan fixed MAV is used for both control design and as well as to verify its performance against the classical control methods. Extensive hardware in-loop simulation results of the proposed control algorithm implemented on the commercially available PX4 based Pixhawk autopilot board are also presented here.