Identification and adaptive PID Control of a hexacopter UAV based on neural networks

Summary In this paper, a novel adaptive PID controller for trajectory‐tracking tasks is proposed. It is implemented in discrete time over a hexacopter, and it takes into consideration the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) nonlinear model. The PID controller is developed following an adaptive neural technique, and its stability is verified by the Lyapunov discrete theory. Besides, the neural identification of the dynamic model of the UAV is presented to backpropagate output errors to adjust PID gains with the purpose of reducing the control errors. The validation of the proposed algorithm is performed through experimental results with a hexacopter.