Fuzzy Adaptive Control of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle for Carrying Time-Varying Cargo on Predefined Path

At present, the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has been increased dramatically. The reasons for this development are cheapness, smallness, simplicity, and diversity of missions. The simplicity of guidance and control of multi-rotor drones is that they are equipped with an autopilot system. This system is responsible for flying control. UAVs do not have a high weight and often have three-phase high-speed motors which makes a fast and complex flight dynamics. In this paper, a fuzzy adaptive PID controller is applied to control an UAV for carrying a time-varying cargo. The performance of the flight control system implemented on a quadrotor is evaluated, experimentally. A sandbox is used to model the time-varying mass. The sand passes from the beginning of the fly through some holes of the box, and after about a minute all the sand is poured. At the end of the paper, the practical results are compared with results obtained by fixed-parameter PID controller.