Flight Controller Design for Altitude Control of a Quadcopter using PID and Fuzzy Methods

Abstract

A quadcopter can be manually controlled or can be autonomous. Therefore, a control system is needed to support the quadcopter's movement. PID and fuzzy control are used in this research to adjust the quadcopter's altitude position. The control system proposed in this research is to keep the quadcopter at a certain altitude. The control system design uses a PID controller, where the control parameters are obtained using the Ziegler-Nichols 2 tuning method. Ziegler-Nichols 2 tuning method is used to obtain the parameters Kp, Ti, and Td. PID control tuning becomes a reference for fuzzy control design in determining input and output membership functions and the rules. Also, in this study, the flight controller board design is proposed. The experiment results show that the PID control has a faster rise time of 0.2 seconds, a better maximum overshoot of 1.56%, a quicker settling time of 1.69 seconds, and a steady-state error of 0% compared to the fuzzy control. The result shows that the use of PID control is more suitable for proposed quadcopter plants because it requires a fast output response.