Robust PID control of quadrotors with power reduction analysis

This paper presents a novel robust controller applied to a quadrotor vehicle for regulation and trajectory tracking tasks. In the proposed scheme, the quadrotor position is controlled by a proportional integral derivative (PID) controller, while the orientation control is achieved through a model-based controller. The proposed controller is combined with a power reduction methodology, which includes a controller-gains tuning stage using the cuckoo search algorithm, and a minimum jerk trajectory design stage. The performance of the new controller is assessed in a free-disturbance case and under the effect of parametric uncertainty and aero-dynamical disturbances. The new controller is compared against two linear PID controllers and a nonlinear sliding mode-based controller. Numerical simulations demonstrate the superiority of the proposed scheme as well as its robustness against different types of perturbations. Also, it is proven that the power demanded by any controller is reduced when using the power reduction methodology.