Modelling and control of a small-scale unmanned helicopter

Dieser Beitrag ist mit Zustimmung des Rechteinhabers aufgrund einer (DFG geförderten) Allianz- bzw. Nationallizenz frei zugänglich.This publication is with permission of the rights owner freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively.The dynamical model of a toy helicopter considered as two rigid bodies is deduced using Kane's equation. Another model is presented that considers the helicopter as a single rigid body. It is shown that the response of the rotational dynamics modelled as two rigid bodies is cosine while that modelled as one rigid body is linear. In addition, a flight controller is presented that is based on dynamic inversion and model predictive control (MPC). In order to decrease the online computational effort associated with a conventional model predictive controller, an explicit MPC algorithm is introduced, which converts the online computations to offline computations to solve the real-time problem. Experimental results show that the controller is able to operate in real-time and can closely track the trajectory without overshoot