Nowadays small unmanned helicopters are widely used for its features of agility, light-weight and safety. They play a significant role in the field of aerial photography, surveillance and inspection. In modern warfare, unmanned helicopters also play an important part that cannot be replaced.

Because helicopter is a non-stable platform, there were lots of difficulties during the development of control systems. Firstly, the extreme agility of a helicopter requires high frequency control signals in order to assist stable control. Secondly, a helicopter does not have a unique control model and it has the features of variability and high coupling, and the control model parameters of different helicopters are very different from each other, which increased the difficulty of controller desig...[ Read more ]

Nowadays small unmanned helicopters are widely used for its features of agility, light-weight and safety. They play a significant role in the field of aerial photography, surveillance and inspection. In modern warfare, unmanned helicopters also play an important part that cannot be replaced.

Because helicopter is a non-stable platform, there were lots of difficulties during the development of control systems. Firstly, the extreme agility of a helicopter requires high frequency control signals in order to assist stable control. Secondly, a helicopter does not have a unique control model and it has the features of variability and high coupling, and the control model parameters of different helicopters are very different from each other, which increased the difficulty of controller design. Thirdly, the advantages of a small unmanned helicopter depend on its small size and light weight, so the size and the weight of the controller shall also be strictly limited. Lastly, any uncertain elements during actually flying can cause safety issues.

In this thesis, we focus on the control algorithm of small unmanned helicopters, the design of the control framework and the realization under different flying status of the helicopters, which includes hovering, flying under velocity reference and way point navigation flight. We have also developed some derivative functions based on the control framework for unmanned helicopters. Because of the trends of popular and civilian applications of unmanned helicopters, the control parameters adjustment becomes a barrier for users who don’t have sufficient knowledge of the control theory to set up the controller on the helicopters themselves. In the latter chapters of this thesis, adaptive parameters adjusting method will be discussed.

Keywords: Small Unmanned Helicopter; Hovering; Automatic Navigation; Way Point; Adaptive Parameter Adjusting