PID controller parameters tuning using metaheuristic methods for quadrotor UAV

Abstract

Since quadrotors are gaining more popularity in research area, due to their control complexity and their highly complicated nature. Although there have been many techniques designed to control quadrotor systems, most of them are characterized with high computational burden. Therefore PID controllers are preferred for their simplicity and effective performance, however in order to achieve such level of efficiency their gains need to be tuned properly. In this work, three well-known metaheuristic algorithms are applied for that purpose, namely: PSO, TLBO, and WOA. The three optimizers were employed to extract the optimum PID gains for altitude, Roll, yaw and pitch angles. A comparative study on the basis of the Integral of Absolute Error, Settling time,Rise Time, and overshoot was conducted to examine the introduced approaches. In general the results have demonstrated the superior performance of the PSO algorithm over its counterparts in most the investigated aspects.