A comparative study of altitude and yaw controllers for rotorcraft UAV

The paper presents a brief study of quadrotor vehicle, its principle of operation and its high-level dynamic model. The proposal of altitude and yaw controllers is also presented. PID, LQR (LQRI) and Lyapunov based control techniques are here compared according to Integral Absolute Error (IAE) and Control Signal Energy criteria. The performance is analyzed in terms of the response time and energy spent to accomplish the task. The optimum controller gains are defined by simulation, after establishing the maximum value of the criteria. In the sequence, some experiments are run to validate the controllers and to compared them in real scenarios of regulation and trajectory tracking tasks.