3-DOF Attitude Control of a Model Helicopter based on Explicit Decoupling and Adaptive Control Scheme

This paper describes a 3-DOF attitude control of a small model helicopter in hover through explicit decoupling and adaptive control scheme. A model helicopter mounted on gimbal-stand is considered as a system that has 3 independent SISO systems representing motions about roll, pitch and yaw axis and these subsystems are identified from the test flight data. In this consideration, the contribution of others to yaw channel is neglected since it is relatively small. Two PID controllers based on Ziegler-Nichols method are designed for roll pitch channels independently. Also, adaptive fuzzy tuner is designed and applied to those PID controllers to cope with coupling effects between each channel and system uncertainties due to variation of engine RPM. The experimental results show that the attitude control ...