Quadcopter Altitude Control Using Classical PID and Cascaded PID with Adaptive Feedforward Extension

In this study, a quadcopter unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is modeled, and then classical PID and adaptive feedforward cascade PID controllers are designed for altitude control. The performance analysis of these controller structures, while the quadcopter UAV performed point tracking and level flight tasks, is conducted according to error metrics the integral of squared error (ISE), the integral of time-weighted squared error (ITSE), the integral of absolute error (IAE), and the integral of time- weighted absolute error (ITAE. The performance of the designed controllers is evaluated with simulations carried out in the MATLAB/Simulink environment. As a result, it is observed that the cascade PID controller increased the performance by an average of 32.6% during the point tracking task, while the adaptive feedforward cascade PID controller demonstrated better performance in terms of error metrics during level flight.