Novel Steering Concepts for Personal Aerial Vehicles

Against the background of constantly growing ground-based traffic and consequently increasing congestion problems, solutions have to be found for meeting the future demand of personal transportation. The European project myCopter is addressing this issue by investigating technologies for future Personal Aerial Vehicles (PAV). These rotorcraft are meant to be available to the general public with a minimal necessary amount of training. This paper is looking for answers to the question of the most suitable control concept for future PAVs. Car-like steering concepts would be a candidate for flight-naïve PAV users. Several concepts have already been designed for rotorcraft but have not further been investigated. DLR is now facing this challenge. In the paper an overview of the historical development of control devices in automobiles and helicopter is given. From this development and research results from related projects a novel control concept for PAVs is proposed. The intention is to offer a control concept that is intuitively understood by PAV users who are already used to steering automobiles. The concept as well as the underlying PAV flight dynamics are explained and a short outlook is given on the planned future research at DLR