Fractional-Order PID Control of Quadrotor Drone

This paper explores quadrotors, unmanned aerial vehicles with four rotors that are most widely used as they are cost-effective and easily built due to their efficiency. The controller system used for these quadrotors is the proportional-integral-derivative (PID) plant model. However, the PID controller has certain limitations in achieving precise position control. To address these limitations, the performance of the PID controller is compared to that of a fractional-order PID (FOPID) controller through simulation. The FOPID controller is designed to fine-tune the PID plant model to improve drone stabilization and minimize disruptions during flight. After fine-tuning, the proposed FOPID controller achieved a lower settling time, better disturbance rejection, and better set point tracking than the PID controller. This performance improvement is also evident when dealing with complex inputs, such as sinusoidal signals.