Abstract

Quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicles (QUAVs) exhibit strongly coupled nonlinear dynamics and are highly sensitive to disturbances and measurement noise, which can significantly degrade trajectory tracking performance and induce chattering in sliding mode-based controllers. In this work, a fractional-order backstepping sliding mode control (FO-BSMC) strategy is proposed for QUAV trajectory tracking. In contrast to existing fractional-order sliding mode approaches, where the fractional operator is typically introduced into the sliding surface or control law, the proposed methodology incorporates fractional-order behavior directly into the QUAV dynamic model through the Caputo definition, while the Grünwald–Letnikov approximation is adopted for numerical implementation. A conventional integer-order BSMC scheme is also developed, and Lyapunov-based stability analyses are presented for both the conventional BSMC and the proposed FO-BSMC formulations. The fractional order is selected using the PSO algorithm. The performance of both controllers is evaluated under external disturbances, perturbed initial conditions, and measurement noise. Monte Carlo simulations are further conducted to assess the sensitivity of the closed-loop system to initialization uncertainties. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed FO-BSMC achieves lower tracking errors, faster convergence, improved robustness against external disturbances and measurement noise, and smoother control actions with reduced chattering than the conventional BSMC.

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