Design of Constrained Predictive Controller by Considering Communication Delay for Quadrotor and Optimal Adjustment of Controller Parameters

Designing the suitable autopilot for the quadrotors is very important in how the flight vehicle moves and follows the specified reference path. One of the suitable controllers for autopilot design is the predictive controller, which is the most well-known Generalized Predictive Controller method. In the autopilot design, constraints on inputs as well as communication delays must be taken into account, and if these two issues are not addressed in the controller design, the autopilot will not function properly and may even lead to instability. In this paper, a generalized predictive controller with consideration for delayed input data for a quadrotor autopilot is presented. Also, in order to determine the predictive control parameters, the Metaheuristic method, particle swarm optimization, has been used and these parameters have been optimally adjusted. In adjusting the controller parameters, the objective function is used based on the performance indicators such as settling time, peak time, overshoot, and steady-state error. By adjusting the weights of this function, the controller performance indicators can be determined. Also, the simulation results show that the controller performance based on the defined objective function is much improved compared to the cost function based on the integral of the error.