Unmanned Helicopter Flight Controller Design by Use of Model Predictive Control

Abstract:- Helicopters are strongly coupled, multivariate, time-delay nonlinear plants. The design of a stable control system for autonomous flight is a challenging task. But because of wide applications, the research on helicopters is booming. In this paper, we will research on a small scale unmanned helicopter. Firstly, kinematical model and dynamical model are presented. Then we design a flight controller which includes an attitude controller and a position controller. As for attitude control, a novel control method, model predictive control (MPC), is applied. The advantages of MPC are that it can deal with the limits of the actuators and the existing time-delay of the plant. Its performance was verified in real flight experiments. The results show that the controller performs well in position control mode. Key-Words:- MPC, unmanned helicopter, flight control, helicopter modeling