Fractional Order PD Path-Following Control of an AR. Drone Quadrotor

In this paper a fractional order proportional-derivative (FO-PD) control strategy is presented and applied to AR. Drone quadrotor system. The controller parameters are calculated based on specifying a certain gain crossover frequency, a phase margin and a robustness to gain variations. Its performance is compared against two other integer order controllers; i) Extended Prediction Self-Adaptive Control (EPSAC) approach to Model Predictive Control (MPC) ii) Integer order PD controller. The closed loop control simulations applied on the AR. Drone system indicate the proposed controller outperforms the integer order PD control. Additionally, the proposed controller has less complexity but similar performance as MPC based control.