Metaheuristic Optimization of Fractional-Order PID Controllers for Quadcopter System

The field of robotics has evolved into a highly interdisciplinary domain, encompassing a wide range of challenges that aid humans in several settings, including land, air, sea, and space. The present work offers a comprehensive examination of a quadcopter, specifically emphasising its modelling, control, and optimisation. The notion of stability response is fundamental to the operation of quadcopters and any robotic mechanisms. The present study investigates the possibility of improving quadcopter stability by illustrating the influence of a fractional-order controller-based PID (FOPID) in systems with high sensitivity. The specific methods are used to optimise the five fractional parameters for each controller. This paper presents a comparison of two optimisation techniques, namely Partial Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Grey Wolf Optimization (GWO), specifically applied to the fractional-order PID controller (FOPID) for the complete quadcopter system. The obtained results indicate that the optimised FOPID controller has significant flexibility in terms of control capabilities compared to classical controllers that are cited in many references, notably decreasing overshoot and enhancing settling and rising times by over 40 % when employing GWO, respecting the same conditions in each algorithm.