Abstract
The research on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) has intensified considerably thanks to the recent growth in the fields of advanced automatic control, artificial intelligence, and miniaturization. In this paper, a Grey Wolf Optimization (GWO) algorithm is proposed and successfully applied to tune all effective parameters of Fast Terminal Sliding Mode (FTSM) controllers for a quadrotor UAV. A full control scheme is first established to deal with the coupled and underactuated dynamics of the drone. Controllers for altitude, attitude, and position dynamics become separately designed and tuned. To work around the repetitive and time-consuming trial-error-based procedures, all FTSM controllers? parameters for only altitude and attitude dynamics are systematically tuned thanks to the proposed GWO metaheuristic. Such a hard and complex tuning task is formulated as a nonlinear optimization problem under operational constraints. The performance and robustness of the GWO-based control strategy are compared to those based on homologous metaheuristics and standard terminal sliding mode approaches. Numerical simulations are carried out to show the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed GWO-tuned FTSM controllers for the altitude and attitude dynamics? stabilization and tracking. Nonparametric statistical analyses revealed that the GWO algorithm is more competitive with high performance in terms of fastness, non-premature convergence, and research exploration/ exploitation capabilities.