There has been significant interest for designing flight controllers for
small-scale unmanned helicopters. Such helicopters preserve all the
physical attributes of their full-scale counterparts, being at the same
time more agile and dexterous. This book presents a comprehensive and
well justified analysis for designing flight controllers for small-scale
unmanned helicopters guarantying flight stability and tracking accuracy.
The design of the flight controller is a critical and integral part for
developing an autonomous helicopter platform. Helicopters are
underactuated, highly nonlinear systems with significant dynamic
coupling that needs to be considered and accounted for during controller
design and implementation. Most reliable mathematical tools for analysis
of control systems relate to modern control theory. Modern control
techniques are model-based since the controller architecture depends on
the dynamic representation of the system to be controlled. Therefore,
the flight controller design problem is tightly connected with the
helicopter modeling.
This book provides a step-by-step methodology for designing, evaluating
and implementing efficient flight controllers for small-scale
helicopters. Design issues that are analytically covered include:
- An illustrative presentation of both linear and nonlinear models of
ordinary differential equations representing the helicopter dynamics. A
detailed presentation of the helicopter equations of motion is given for
the derivation of both model types. In addition, an insightful
presentation of the main rotor's mechanism, aerodynamics and dynamics is
also provided. Both model types are of low complexity, physically
meaningful and capable of encapsulating the dynamic behavior of a large
class of small-scale helicopters.
- An illustrative and rigorous derivation of mathematical control
algorithms based on both the linear and nonlinear representation of the
helicopter dynamics. Flight controller designs guarantee that the
tracking objectives of the helicopter's inertial position (or velocity)
and heading are achieved. Each controller is carefully constructed by
considering the small-scale helicopter's physical flight capabilities.
Concepts of advanced stability analysis are used to improve the
efficiency and reduce the complexity of the flight control system.
Controller designs are derived in both continuous time and discrete time
covering discretization issues, which emerge from the implementation of
the control algorithm using microprocessors.
- Presentation of the most powerful, practical and efficient methods
for extracting the helicopter model parameters based on input/output
responses, collected by the measurement instruments. This topic is of
particular importance for real-life implementation of the control
algorithms.
This book is suitable for students and researches interested in the
development and the mathematical derivation of flight controllers for
small-scale helicopters. Background knowledge in modern control is
required.
