Hover testing system for single rotor radio controlled helicopter system

Making an RC helicopter perform hovering is one of the most challenging techniques that can be performed when flying an RC helicopter either with a human pilot or a navigation system. This study provides a hover testing system that allows researchers to test the hover function of the ADARNA RC helicopter in a controlled environment. This computer controlled electromechanical system allows the helicopter to hover while it monitors pitch, roll and yaw states as well as the helicopter\u27s horizontal position, vertical position and depth (x, y and z axes respectively). If the helicopter goes beyond the set bounds of the system it then restricts the helicopter and safely lands it onto the effective platform area. The results show that the system is able to provide telemetry of the helicopter. The telemetry data are used so that the developed servo plaftform can resposition its actuators to safely restrain the helicopter as well as an input to the model created using machine learning on heuristically acquired data. The success rate of the model based on test flight data, which is created using a J48 decision tree, is above 95% in correcly classifying the state of the helicopter as safe or unsafe with high ROC and kappa statistic scores. The servo motors used for repositioning take approximately one second to traverse its 180 degrees range of motion. The overall system response is measured to be approximately 1.11 seconds for optical flow and 1.01 for kalman filter algorithm from helicopter detection to helicopter restraint. The system\u27s limitation is that it can only accommodate a helicopter with a maximum flight speed of approximately 59 and 64 centimeters per second when using optical flow and kalman filter algorithms respectively. In order to improve the specifications of the system, an RC helicopter with little amount of blade flap can be used so that the speed of the restraining motor can be increased without consequence to the helicopter\u27s safety. The platform design can also be improved by either giving the mec