Trajectory tracking for the quadcopter UAV utilizing fuzzy PID control approach

Abstract

Currently, the quadcopter Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are playing a significant role in combating the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, which induced the researchers to design robust control techniques. In this paper, a fuzzy PID controller is designed to stabilize and/or track the desired trajectory of the quadcopter UAV. The mathematical model of the quadcopter UAV has been briefly presented, where it has been divided into two portions, the position dynamic and the attitude dynamic subsystems. Subsequently, a robust fuzzy PID controller has been designed for both the inner loop and outer loop to control and stabilize the position and the attitude of the quadcopter, which adaptively manipulate the system's input based on the tracking error. The proposed controller is benchmarked with the conventional PID controller to show the robustness of the fuzzy PID controller. Fuzzy PID controller has been verified through simulation work utilizing Matlab/Simulink, where better performance is achieved compared with the conventional PID controller. It is found that the errors in the quadcopter's attitude and position have been significantly reduced through using fuzzy PID controller by 70% and 87%, respectively.