Time delays, parameter uncertainties, and disturbances are the fundamental problems that hinder the stability and reduce dramatically the tracking performance of dynamical systems. In this paper, a new state-dependent nonlinear time-varying sliding mode control autopilot structure is proposed to cope with these dynamical and environmental complexities for an unmanned helicopter. The presented technique is based on freezing the nonlinear system equations on each time step and designing a controller using the frozen system model at this time step. The proposed method offers an improved performance in the presence of major disturbances and parameter uncertainties by adapting itself to possible dynamical varieties without a need of trimming the system on different operating conditions. Unlike the existing linear cascade autopilot structure, this study also proposes a nonlinear cascade state-dependent coefficient helicopter autopilot structure consisting of four separate nonlinear sub-systems. The proposed method is tested through the real time and PC-based simulations. To show the performance of the proposed robust method, it is also bench-marked against a linear sliding control control in PC-based simulations.
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