Design and Experimental Comparison of PID, LQR and MPC Stabilizing Controllers for Parrot Mambo Mini-Drone

Abstract

Parrot Mambo mini-drone is a readily available commercial quadrotor platform to understand and analyze the behavior of a quadrotor both in indoor and outdoor applications. This study evaluates the performance of three alternative controllers on a Parrot Mambo mini-drone in an interior environment, including Proportional–Integral–Derivative (PID), Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR), and Model Predictive Control (MPC). To investigate the controllers’ performance, initially, the MATLAB®/Simulink™ environment was considered as the simulation platform. The successful simulation results finally led to the implementation of the controllers in real-time in the Parrot Mambo mini-drone. Here, MPC surpasses PID and LQR in ensuring the system’s stability and robustness in simulation and real-time experiment results. Thus, this work makes a contribution by introducing the impact of MPC on this quadrotor platform, such as system stability and robustness, and showing its efficacy over PID and LQR. All three controllers demonstrate similar tracking performance in simulations and experiments. In steady state, the maximal pitch deviation for the PID controller is 0.075 rad, for the LQR, it is 0.025 rad, and for the MPC, it is 0.04 rad. The maximum pitch deviation for the PID-based controller is 0.3 rad after the take-off impulse, 0.06 rad for the LQR, and 0.17 rad for the MPC.