Unmanned Helicopters

Autonomous vertical autorotation for unmanned helicopters

Structured H1 Command and Control-Loop Design for Unmanned Helicopters

The aim of this paper is to present rigorous and efficient methods for designing flight controllers for unmanned helicopters that have guaranteed performance, intuitive appeal for the flight control engineer, and prescribed multivariable loop structures. Helicopter dynamics do not decouple as they do for the fixed-wing aircraft case, and so the design of helicopter flight controllers with a des...

Hybrid 3-D Formation Control for Unmanned Helicopters

Teams of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) form typical networked cyberphysical systems that involve the interaction of discrete logic and continuous dynamics. This paper presents a hybrid supervisory control framework for the three-dimensional leader follower formation control of unmanned helicopters. The proposed hybrid control framework captures internal interactions between the decision makin...

Towards Autonomous Autorotation Landing for Small Size Unmanned Helicopters

The consideration of safety issues in the operation of helicopters involves the capability to perform emergency descending maneuvers through the autorotation principle when the engine is no longer supplying power. When comparing manned and unmanned helicopters, the lower rotor inertia of UAV configurations makes this functionality even more challenging for the pilot since more accurate timing a...

Hybrid three-dimensional formation control for unmanned helicopters

This paper presents a hybrid supervisory control framework for the three-dimensional leader–follower formation control of unmanned helicopters. In particular, a spherical abstraction of the state space is proposed. Utilizing the properties of multi-affine functions over the partitioned space, a finite state model is obtained, which is shown to be bisimilar to the original continuous-variable dy...