Twin rotor control with PI-PD controller

Twin rotor MIMO system (TRMS) is one of the basic systems used in air vehicles and control. TRMS is one of the most common examples of multi-input multi-output systems in the literature. In this thesis, the control of TRMS, which is the basis of helicopter systems and the drone systems, which have recently being worked thoroughly, has been studied. First, transfer functions of pitch rotor, yaw rotor, cross pitch and cross yaw transfer functions of the real TRMS system have been obtained. Then, Particle Swarm Optimisation (PSO) has been used to find optimum tuning parameters of PI-PD and PID controllers. In the literature, generally, PID controllers are used to control the TRMS. However, PID controllers may perform poorly except for open loop stable systems. On the other hand, PI-PD controllers have shown to perform much better in cases where PID controllers fail. Therefore, in this study, the control of TRMS, which is an open loop unstable system, with PI-PD controllers has been studied. A step input, sinusoidal input, square input and saw-tooth input were used as the reference in order to compare closed loop performances obtained from PID and PI-PD controllers. It has been shown by both simulation and real time studies that PI-PD controllers can result in better closed loop responses in controlling the TRMS than PID controllers.