Performance Evaluation of a PID and a Fuzzy PID Controllers Designed for Controlling a Simulated Quadcopter Rotational Dynamics Model

Abstract

This work is concerned with designing two types of controllers, a PID and a Fuzzy PID, to be usedfor flying and stabilizing a quadcopter. The designed controllers have been tuned, tested, and compared using two performance indices which are the Integral Square Error (ISE) and the IntegralAbsolute Error (IAE), and also some response characteristics like the rise time, overshoot, settlingtime, and the steady state error. To try and test the controllers, a quadcopter mathematical model hasbeen developed. The model concentrated on the rotational dynamics of the quadcopter, i.e. the roll,pitch, and yaw variables. The work has been simulated with “MATLAB”. To make testing thesimulated model and the controllers more realistic, the testing signals have been applied by a userthrough a joystick interfaced to the computer. The results obtained indicated a general superiority inperformance for the Fuzzy PID controller over the PID controller used in this work. This conclusion is based by the following figures:                 lesser ISA for the roll, pitch, and yawconsequently,                   lesser IAE for the roll, pitch, and yaw consequently,              lesser rise time and settling time for the roll and pitch consequently, and    lesser settling time for the yaw. Moreover, the FPID gave zero overshoot versus    ,    ,and     in the PID case for the roll, pitch, and yaw consequently. Both controllers gave zero steady state error with close rise times for the yaw. This superiority of the FPID controller is gained as thefuzzy part of it continuously and online adapts the parameters of the PID part.