Nonlinear Altitude Control of a Quadcopter Drone Using Interval Type-2 Fuzzy Logic
Ayad Al-Mahturi, Fendy Santoso, Matthew Garratt, Sreenatha Gopalarao Anavatti · 2018
The development of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has become one of the most fruitful research areas in the field of autonomous flight control. Quadcopters are chosen due to their simple mechanical structure which is able to hover in a stationary manner, vertical take-off and landing. Nevertheless, these types of aircraft are highly nonlinear and under-actuated systems. Intelligent control such as fuzzy logic is a suitable choice for controlling nonlinear systems. However, type-1 fuzzy control cannot handle uncertainties of nonlinear systems. As a solution, interval type-2 fuzzy control has the advantage of being able to deal with uncertainties. This research proposes the use of interval type-2 fuzzy for controlling the altitude of a nonlinear quadcopter UAV using Gaussian membership function and utilizing the Enhance Iterative Algorithm with Stop Condition (EIASC) algorithm for type-reduction. A comparison between the proposed interval type-2 fuzzy controller and proportional-Derivative (PD) controller is illustrated. Simulation results demonstrated that the tracking performance of the proposed controller outperformed the PD controller.