Optimization of ANFIS controllers using improved ant colony to control an UAV trajectory tracking task

Abstract

Development of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has become the most important research areas in the field of autonomous aeronautical control. This paper proposes a robust and intelligent controller based on adaptive-network-based fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) and improved ant colony optimization (IACO) to govern the behavior of a three degree of freedom quadrotor UAV. The quadrotor was chosen due to its simple mechanical structure; nevertheless, these types of aircraft are highly nonlinear. Intelligent control such as fuzzy logic is a suitable choice for controlling nonlinear systems. The ANFIS controller is used to reproduce the desired trajectory of the quadrotor in 2D Vertical plane and the IACO algorithm aims is to facilitate convergence to the ANFIS’s optimal parameters in order to reduce learning errors and improve the quality of the controller. To evaluate the performance of the proposed IACO tuned ANFIS controller, a comparison between the proposed ANFIS-IACO controller and other controller’s performance such us ANFIS only and proportional–integral–derivative controllers is illustrated using the same system. As expected, the hybrid ANFIS-IACO controller gives very satisfactory results than the others methods already developed in the same study.