Authors:
Gabriela Andaluz
1
;
Zahid Nazate
1
;
Paulo Leica
1
and
Guillermo Palacios-Navarro
2
Affiliations:
1
Departamento de Automatización y Control Industrial, Escuela Politécnica Nacional, Quito 170525, Ecuador
;
2
Department of Electronic Engineering and Communications, University of Zaragoza, Teruel 44003, Spain
Keyword(s):
Aerial Manipulators, Fractional-Order PID, FOPID Control, UMA, Trajectory Tracking, UAV-Based Manipulation.
Abstract:
This work presents a Fractional Order PID (FOPID) control strategy for trajectory tracking of an Unmanned Aerial Manipulator (UAM), proposed as an alternative to the conventional PID controller. Unlike classical integer-order controllers, the FOPID design enables more flexible tuning of the aerial manipulator’s kinematic response by introducing five independent tuning parameters. This added flexibility enhances system stability and improves robustness against abrupt reference changes. The controller parameters are optimized through Integral of Squared Error (ISE) minimization to ensure efficient performance. Simulation results confirm that the FOPID controller achieves superior trajectory tracking accuracy compared to the conventional PID. Specifically, the ISE values obtained with the FOPID reflect reductions of 23.46%, 24.99%, and 15.35% in the tracking errors along the 𝑥, 𝑦 and 𝑧̃ directions, respectively. These results validate the effectiveness of the FOPID approach in impr
oving the control performance of unmanned aerial manipulators.
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