Flight Testing of a Mini Helicopter in Hover

Abstract

Since the beginning of this century, the field of autonomous vehicles has been evolving rapidly because of the potential applications in various domains. This paper presents the current research activity going on at IIT Kanpur, India in the development of an autonomous mini-helicopter. A flight test was performed to achiece semi-autonomous hover of the mini-helicopter. The complete system architecture comprising of the ground station, wireless systems for communications and on board electronics will be disscussed in this paper.

After achieving 6-DOF control in tethered hover of the mini-helicopter in the lab, an experiment was conducted to acquire the radio inputs given by an RC-pilot to hover the vehicle. During the experiment the rpm was controlled by the PXI system and the longitudinal, lateral, yaw and collective inputs were provided manually. The control inputs and the flight dynamics data were collected during the experiment. The details of the flight data and their analysis will be presented in the final paper.