Towards the Development of Fractional-Order Flight Controllers for the Quadrotor

The criterion for the development and associated parameter tunning of a class of fractional-order proportional-integral-derivative controllers, regarding the attitude stabilization as the inner control loop, is proposed for the quadrotor in this work. To facilitate this development, the dynamic model of the quadrotor is firstly formulated, and the transfer function of the inner loop is presented based on the real-time flights conducted in previous researches. With the obtained transfer function model, a class of fractional order controllers, including fractional order proportional-derivative controllers and proportional-integral controllers are developed accordingly. For each controller, the parameter tunning methods are addressed in details. To verify the effectiveness of this development, numeric simulations are conducted at last, and the results clearly verify the superiority of the fractional order controllers over conventional proportional-integral-derivative controllers in real-time flight of the quadrotor.