Control System Design and Testing for a Small Scale Autonomous Helicopter

Abstract

Small scale helicopters have been increasingly deployed for diverse scientific and commercial applications in the recent past. Their versatility has made them an ideal option for various missions ranging from film making, agriculture, volcanic surveillance to power line inspection. Compared to their full scale counterparts, however, the small scale helicopters posses a higher bandwidth of dynamics and a greater  sensitivity to control inputs which make them more difficult to control. The paper deals with the control system design and testing for an autonomous small scale helicopter. A nonlinear dynamics model of the helicopter is derived from the Euler-Newton equations of motion. The nonlinear model is used as part of Hardware In the Loop Simulation (HILS) environment developed for the simulation, validation and testing of an autonomous control system. Linear control system is designed for the motion decoupled into longitudinal and lateral directional modes. The gains of the cascaded control architecture are optimized within the HILS environment. Various autonomous flight operations are achieved and it is demonstrated that the prediction from the simulations are in a good agreement with the flight experiment.