Tuning PID attitude stabilization of a quadrotor using particle swarm optimization (experimental)

Proportional, Integral and Derivative (PID) controllers are the most popular type of controller used in industrial applications because of their notable simplicity and effective implementation. However, manual tuning of these controllers is tedious and often leads to poor performance. The conventional Ziegler-Nichols (Z-N) method of PID tuning was done experimentally enables easy identification stable PID parameters in a short time, but is accompanied by overshoot, high steady-state error, and large rise time. Therefore, in this study, the modern heuristics approach of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) was employed to enhance the capabilities of the conventional Z-N technique. PSO with the constriction coefficient method experimentally demonstrated the ability to efficiently and effectively identify optimal PID controller parameters for attitude stabilization of a quadrotor.