  The expectation of unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) pushes the operation
environment to narrow spaces, where the systems may fly very close to an object
and perform an interaction. This phase brings the variation in UAV dynamics:
thrust and drag coefficient of the propellers might change under different
proximity. At the same time, UAVs may need to operate under external
disturbances to follow time-based trajectories. Under these challenging
conditions, a standard controller approach may not handle all missions with a
fixed structure, where there may be a need to adjust its parameters for each
different case. With these motivations, practical implementation and evaluation
of an autonomous controller applied to a quadrotor UAV are proposed in this
work. A self-adaptive controller based on a composite control scheme where a
combination of sliding mode control (SMC) and evolving neuro-fuzzy control is
used. The parameter vector of the neuro-fuzzy controller is updated adaptively
based on the sliding surface of the SMC. The autonomous controller possesses a
new elastic structure, where the number of fuzzy rules keeps growing or get
pruned based on bias and variance balance. The interaction of the UAV is
experimentally evaluated in real time considering the ground effect, ceiling
effect and flight through a strong fan-generated wind while following
time-based trajectories.
