Aggressive maneuvering of a quadcopter via differential flatness-based fuzzy controllers: From tuning to experiments

In recent years, the rapid development in contemporary technology has brought nano quadcopters with high agility. This paper presents a new differential flatness-based Single Input Fuzzy Logic Controller (SFLC) structure for aggressive maneuvering control alongside its real-world application on Crazyflie 2.1 nano quadcopter. We propose both Type-1 and Interval Type-2 SFLCs as the primary controllers in the flight control system, which are built on the concept of differential flatness. We investigate how the design parameters of SFLCs shape the characteristics of the fuzzy mapping through a geometric approach by analyzing the region and level of aggressiveness/smoothness. Based on the analysis, we present simple tuning guidelines and then design fuzzy logic-based flight control systems, which were implemented as onboard real-time controllers. Finally, we evaluate the performance of SFLCs in comparison with their crisp differential flatness-based nonlinear counterparts for four trajectories with distinct dynamics and shapes in the real world. The presented comparative experimental results clearly show the performance improvements when the proposed T1 and IT2 SFLCs are deployed for real-time aggressive maneuvering.