TRAJECTORY OPTIMIZATION OF ROTORCRAFT VEHICLES INCLUDING PILOT-IN-THE-LOOP EFFECTS

The ability to simulate maneuvers of rotorcraft vehicles flying at the boundaries of the flight enve-lope is a valuable asset for performance analysis, handling qualities research, design and certification, pilot training, and support to the flight test activity. For all these applications, the performance limits of a rotorcraft can be estimated by using numerical optimization techniques. Using this approach, the maneuver of interest is formulated in terms of an optimal control problem, whose ingredients are a cost function to be minimized and constraints to be satisfied, for a given mathematical model of the vehicle; solving the problem yields both the control inputs and the vehicle response which minimize the cost and satisfy the constraints. Without such automated procedures and formulation, one would have to find the performance limits of the vehicle by forward time marching simulations, using a trial and error process on the vehicle inputs. Numerical procedures to solve trajectory optimization prob-lems in rotorcraft flight mechanics have been previously developed by our research group, as described in detail in Refs. [3, 4, 5, 6]. In this paper we refine our previous approach by including models of the pilot in the optimization procedure. In the absence of a pilot model, the solution of a trajectory optimization problem amount