Flight control of a rotary wing UAV including flapping dynamics

This paper presents the development and experimental implementation of a novel two-time scale controller for the hover control of a Rotary wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (RUAV). Flapping and servo dynamics, important from a practical point of view, are included in the RUAV model. The two-time scale controller takes advantage of the ‘decoupling’ of the translational and rotation dynamics of the rigid body, resulting in a two-level hierarchical control scheme. The inner loop (attitude control) tracks the attitude commands generated by the outer loop controller and sets the main rotor thrust vector, while the outer loop (position control) tracks the reference position. Hover flight experimental results are presented in this paper using the proposed two-time scale controller