Performance Analysis of PID controller for Path Planning of a Quadcopter

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) have become more and more popular in military, commercial and several other applications. Due to its structural simplicity and complexity on controls, quadcopters have become the topic of research in recent years. Focus of this work is to understand the basics of the quadcopter dynamics and to develop an autonomous navigation and trajectory planning for quadcopters. The dynamic model of the quadcopter used for the study is based on Newton-Euler equations. A PID based control on the Quadcopter model available in MATLAB & Simulink is tested and verified by simulating the model for different types of trajectories. The controller parameters are tuned to achieve minimal tracking error without compromising on the controller response time.