Light weight quadrotors are highly manoeuvrable autonomous aerial robots (UAV) that outperform most UAVs; however, quadrotors are prone to a wide class of aerodynamic disturbances, vibrations, and uncertainties that demand not only robust but fast attitude control structures. These arguments are compelling enough to motivate the design of a novel fractional‐order control scheme that enforces finite‐time convergence of the sliding manifold to guarantee local exponential tracking. The controller does not exhibit chattering and does not require the knowledge of the dynamic model. The stability analysis is based on a proposed resetting memory principle to deal with memory effects of the differintegral operator, which allows the controller to tackle also robustness against continuous disturbances that are not necessarily differentiable in the conventional sense such as some aerodynamic phenomena. Experimental evidence is presented and discussed to expose the enforcement of the sliding manifold based on a fractional‐order reaching phase that demonstrates the feasibility of the proposed control scheme.

Quadrotors are highly maneuverable lightweight drones, which are prone to aerodynamic disturbances, vibrations, and uncertainties. These factors stand for a problem that demands robust control laws. For position tracking, the control problem is exacerbated, because the plant is underactuated in the coordinates of interest, requiring a high-performance attitude tracking to resolve underactuation. In this brief, a novel fractional-order controller is proposed by considering a well-posed map that relates the position/yaw control to the desired attitude references. The attitude control is continuous and enforces and sustains a sliding motion in finite time for exponential convergence of the tracking errors to fulfill a ``virtual'' position controller. The resulting closed-loop system is robust against the continuous disturbances that are not necessarily differentiable in the conventional sense. A numerical study based on the simulations is presented to analyze the advantages of the fractional actions to design a physically realizable controller, and the experiments are discussed to expose the reliability of the proposed fractional scheme implemented in an ``X'' configuration quadrotor.

A robust attitude quadrotor control based on a novel fractional-order PI nonlinear structure is proposed and experimentally validated. The proportional action depends on a nonlinear transformation of the sliding variable, while the integral action of fractional-order rejects non-differentiable disturbances, such as turbulent effects and gust winds, enforcing a sliding motion in finite-time. The exponential convergence of a quaternion-based error is guaranteed for well-posed attitude tracking, and the regularity of the control signal can be adjusted with respect to the fractional order. Notably, the proposal includes, as particular cases, first-order and second-order sliding mode control schemes. Experiments illustrate the viability of the proposal, and a comparative study versus PD, PI-like, firstorder sliding mode and second-order sliding mode super-twisting controllers is presented and discussed.