Active Disturbance Rejection Control of Quadrotor UAV based on Whale Optimization Algorithm

This paper aims at the problems of nonlinearity, underactuated, strong coupling, and difficult controller parameter tuning in the control process of quadrotor UAV, PID controller and ADRC are designed to control the quadrotor UAV, and the controller parameters are optimized by the Whale Optimization Algorithm. Firstly, the ADRC is designed to control the attitude loop of the quadrotor UAV. The Extended State Observer (ESO) is designed for yaw, pitch, and roll channels to observe and compensate the internal uncertainties and external disturbances in real-time, and to realize decoupling control. Secondly, in the position control system, the PID controller is used to realize the stable tracking of position variables. Finally, the Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA) is designed to optimize the Active Disturbance Rejection Controller and PID controller for the quadrotor UAV, which has many controller parameters and is difficult to get the optimal control effect. In this method, the parameters of the controller are taken as the objective of WOA optimization to achieve the optimal control effect. The simulation results show that the WOA optimized controller has a smaller overshoot and faster adjustment time compared with human tuning parameters.