Event-Based PID Control: Application to a Mini Quadrotor Helicopter

Although periodicity simplifies design and analysis in control theory, it is no more adapted for embedded systems because it results in a conservative usage of resources. Indeed, the control signal is computed and updated at the same rate regardless whether is really required or not. On the other hand, event-driven sampling calls for resources whenever they are indeed necessary. Event-based PID controllers are proposed in this paper as an alternative to classical PID approaches, with the same performance but reducing the control updates. The algorithms are built here without safety limit condition contrary to the seminal event-based PID setup that was originally proposed by Årzén (1999), in order to reduce the periodicity even more. Both integral and derivative terms are considered. The different approaches are tested for controlling the position of a real-time mini quadrotor helicopter. A reduction of the computing and communication resources utilization is demonstrated for similar final performance.