Disturbance-observer-based fuzzy terminal sliding mode control for MIMO uncertain nonlinear systems

•Modelling and simulation of a novel five-rotor unmanned aerial vehicle with an extra rotor.•Proposing a disturbance-observer-based fuzzy terminal sliding mode controller.•Considering MIMO uncertain nonlinear systems with unmeasured external disturbance.•Unknown non-symmetric input saturation and control singularity are investigated.•Closed-loop stability and convergence of the state estimations in finite time are proved. This study is concerned with the design of a disturbance-observer-based fuzzy terminal sliding mode controller (FTSMC) for multi-input multi-output (MIMO) uncertain nonlinear systems by considering unknown non-symmetric input saturation and control singularity. The disturbance observer is proposed for the unmeasured external disturbance and guarantees the convergence of the disturbance estimation error to zero in a finite time. The terminal sliding mode controller (TSMC) is designed for MIMO uncertain nonlinear systems by utilizing the output of the proposed disturbance observer. This control scheme combines the disturbance-observer-based TSMC with a fuzzy logic system in the presence of unknown non-symmetric input saturation and control singularity in order to reduce chattering phenomena. Finite time asymptotic stability, convergence of the disturbance observer, and convergence of the closed-loop system are proved via Lyapunov stability theorem. In addition, a five-rotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is employed in the numerical simulations to demonstrate the effectiveness and performance of the proposed control scheme. Disturbance observer estimates the payload and flight endurance of the five-rotor UAV. Genetic algorithm (GA) optimization is used to specify the parameters of the disturbance-observer-based TSMC (GATSMC) to decrease chattering. Finally, the superior performance of FTSMC is investigated over TSMC and GATSMC.