Since 2009, research on unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) especially quadcopter system has attracted a considerable attention from researchers in the field. The quadcopter system is actually a class of flying robot that has ability to take off and landing in a vertical condition. Moreover, it has the advantage of good mobility, simple mechanics, and the carriage load ability. Therefore, the thesis focuses on developing a controller for vertical take-off and landing of a less human interaction UAV quadcopter system. The thesis begins with the quadcopter mathematical model derivation. The model takes into account all the hardware constraints such as, maximum speed and torque of brushless direct current (BLDC) motor, total payload, size of popeller and the electronic speed controller specification. Therefore, several experiments were undertaken to obtain important parameters such as the lift force factor, drag factor, and moment of inertia which required in order to estimate the behavior of the system and to reach better accuracy when designing the control. According to the study of quadcopter mathematical model, it has a non-linear system characteristics, where the acceleration quadcopter for dynamic and kinematic of system not directly proportional to the speed of the rotating propeller. Hence, attitude and altitude control system must be designed to meet the autonomous control system. The automatic attitude controller of the quadcopter is about controlling the angle of quadcopter body frame to generate the movement acceleration. This system is designed by combining the proportional integral derivative (PID) attitude control on Quadcopter rigid body with PID acceleration control of Quadcopter movement. The results revealed that the propose combined the controller improved the acceleration control compared to single axis tilting quadcopter approach. Then, the controller was tested for the targeted of 100m distance and the simulation result showed that the quadcopter able to reach the distance in 25.95s. On the other hand, the automatic altitude controller of the quadcopter is responsible to control the thrust force of the motor to produce desired vertical acceleration of quadcopter. The altitude controller has been tested on the prototype model for 1m targeted height and the simulation result confirmed that the quadcopter system able to reach the targeted height in 2s. The second stage of the analysis is to design and evaluate the altitude controller for real time application. For this purpose, PCI-1711 data acquisition card is used as an interface for controller design which routes from Matlab-Simulink to hardware. The real time application result shown that the quadcopter system able to reach the targeted height in 2.3s and the efficiency of without overshooting is 80.4% compared to the simulation result. Thus, The results revealed that the proposed PID altitude control improved the solution of altitude control in comparison to PD and back-stepping controller approach
