Control of an quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle with a fractional order controller

In this thesis, four-rotors quadrotor (quadrocopter) type unmanned aerial vehicle with the capability of vertical take-off/landing (VTOL) is controlled by both classical PID and fractional order PID controllers. In addition to classical PID controller parameters Kp, Ki and Kd, fractional order PID controllers have also 𝜆 and 𝜇 parameters. Heuristic optimization tools genetic algorithm and particle swarm optimization are used to determine these five different parameters. Fractional order PID and classical PID controllers are compared in terms of the objective function criteria values which are tried to be minimized by using heuristic optimization methods. Observations showed that using ITSE criteria and particle swarm optimization in fractional order PID controllers give best results.