![]() I gain determines the flight controller’s effort in maintaining the drone’s attitude against external forces, such as wind and off-centered CG (center of gravity). Conversely, when P gain is too low, the quadcopter feels sloppy and slow to respond. Excessively high P gain can even cause oscillations. If P gain is too high, the quadcopter tends to over-correct, resulting in sharp bounce-backs during flips and rolls. A high P gain creates a snappy response, making it feel as though your rates have increased. P gain determines the intensity with which the flight controller works to correct errors.Ĭonsider P gain as a responsiveness setting. While understanding the inner workings of PID is not necessary, it is crucial to know how changing these gains affect your drone’s performance. Tweaking PID gains influences a quadcopter’s flight behavior. When tuned correctly, your drone will track the stick movements accurately, providing a direct and responsive feel without wobbles or oscillations. The objective of PID tuning is to achieve the perfect strike that gets the ball into the hole as quickly as possible. You continue until the ball reaches the hole. Each time you hit the ball, it might overshoot or undershoot the target, but with every attempt, it gets closer. Imagine trying to get a golf ball into the hole (setpoint). These principles apply to any flight controller firmware that uses a PID controller, such as Betaflight, Ardupilot, KISS, iNAV, Cleanflight, EmuFlight, Baseflight, etc. Users can assign a gain to each term, with higher gains increasing the term’s influence on flight characteristics. It addresses external forces that occur over time, such as a drone drifting away from set-point due to wind or an off-centered weight, by adjusting motor speeds to counteract it – in math term it’s the integral of the error. It considers how quickly the set-point is approached and counteracts P to minimize overshoot when nearing the target – in math term, it’s the derivative of the error. The larger the error, the harder it pushes – in math term, it’s proportional to the error. P (Proportional) relates to the present error.There are three terms in a PID controller: Proportional (P), Integral (I), and Derivative (D). The PID algorithm is a crucial part of the control system. Betaflight can perform up to 8000 control loops per second (by setting PID Loop Frequency to 8KHz in the software). The control loop continuously reads sensor data and calculates motor speeds to minimize the error. The “error” is the difference between set-point (how fast we want the drone to rotate), and the gyro sensor’s measurement (how fast the drone is actually rotating).Ī PID controller’s primary goal in an FPV drone is to correct the “error” by adjusting motor speeds. The desired rotational rate is called “set-point”. There are a few key terms that you should familiarize yourself with before delving deeper into this article: set-point, error, control loop, and looptime. PID, which stands for Proportional, Integral, Derivative, is an algorithm within a flight controller’s software that reads data from sensors and processes radio stick commands to calculate the required motor speed for achieving the desired rotational rate. Mastering PID tuning enables you to transform a drone that “flies well” into one that “flies perfectly” according to your unique style. Still, there’s always room for improvement, and individual preferences for handling and flight characteristics vary. While these improvements don’t negate the importance of PID tuning, they have made it less critical for basic flight. However, thanks to advancements in noise filtering and optimized algorithms in modern flight controller software, quadcopters can now fly reasonably well with default settings. This made PID tuning an absolute necessity. ![]() In the early days of the hobby, flight controller firmware were less refined, causing FPV drones to perform poorly with default PID values. PID Adjustment Page in Betaflight Configurator
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