A comparative study on the control of quadcopter UAVs by using singleton and non-singleton fuzzy logic controllers

Fuzzy logic controllers (FLCs) have extensively been used for the autonomous control and guidance of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) due to their capability of handling uncertainties and delivering adequate control without the need for a precise, mathematical system model which is often either unavailable or highly costly to develop. Despite the fact that non-singleton FLCs (NSFLCs) have shown more promising performance in several applications when compared to their singleton counterparts (SFLCs), most of UAV applications are still realized by using SFLCs. In this paper, we explore the potential of both standard and the recently introduced centroid based NSFLCs, i.e., Sta-NSFLC and Cen-NSFLC, for the control of a quadcopter UAV under various input noise conditions using different levels of fuzzifier, and a comparative study has been conducted using the three aforementioned FLCs. We present a series of simulation-based experiments, the simulation results show that the control performances of NSFLCs are better than those of SFLC, and the Cen-NSFLC outperforms the Sta-NSFLC especially under highly noisy conditions.