Fuzzy+PID attitude control of a co-axial octocopter

The study of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has grown fast recently, and various applications have been developed. This paper presents a design and implementation of attitude control of a co-axial octocopter (CAO). The dynamic model of a CAO is obtained from making the configuration similar to a quadcopter. In order to stabilize the attitude control of CAO, we propose a Fuzzy+PID design of the attitude controller. Both computer simulation and real-time experiments have been carried out by using LabVIEW programming. In the simulation, we investigated the performance of the proposed Fuzzy+PID controller and tuned the controller parameters. NI-MyRio has been chosen to implement the controller onboard the octocopter. The practical experiments show that the proposed Fuzzy+PID controllers can handle the disturbances during flying and have certain robustness against the environmental conditions. The experimental results validate the simulations and verify the effectiveness of the developed controller.