In this paper, a comparative study between different PID tunning techniques is presented. The proposed techniques are applied to solve the formation configuration problem for a cooperative team of unmanned vehicles. The formation problem for the cooperative team is divided into two levels of control, one is the backstepping control technique for the stabilization of the team members positions as a higher controller. Simultaneously, PID controller receives the desired position to stabilize the attitude control as a lower controller to track the desired planning trajectories. The main contribution of this paper is the comparison between the different control approaches in tunning the PID gains to stabilize attitude control for the leader quadrotor. Simulation results present the assessment of the proposed PID control technique compared with different PID tuning approaches such as local optimal control, fraction order, Ziegler–Nichols and genetic algorithm. Moreover, disturbance rejection and white noise attenuation criterions are inspected to evaluate the ability of the proposed controllers to preserve the stability of the system.