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

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