A Study of the Interaction of Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) Control in a Quadcopter Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Using Design of Experiment

UAV applications are dependent on the stability of flight it can perform. Visually, poor flight stability appears to be having a shaking or oscillating movement that is not desirable, while good flight stability lacks this kind of effect. It is important to be able to tune the control system so that the flight performance of the UAV will be steady and free from oscillating motion. PID control is one of the commonly used control schemes to create a stable flight for UAVs. In this paper, the interaction of the PID values on the stability of the flight is investigated using Design of Experiment. A 2K Factorial Design is used as the experimental design to observe which factors and interactions, or both, significantly affect the stability of the quadcopter UAV. Using Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), the result of the experiment showed that the interaction of PI and PD values are significant in minimizing the error of the flight stability of the tested UAV system setup.