The ability of a helicopter to carry externally slung loads makes the aircraft very versatile for many civil and military operations. However, the piloted handling qualities of the helicopter are degraded by the presence of the slung load. A control system is developed that uses measurements of the slung load motions as well as conventional fuselage feedback to improve the handling qualities for hover/low speed operations. Past research has been limited to studies focused on load damping, as opposed to the piloted handling qualities focus of this paper. The approach implements an explicit model following control system with cable angle feedback for the externally loaded UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter, which is optimized via multi-objective optimization software to simultaneously meet stability, performance, and handling qualities requirements. The improvements provided by this control system are demonstrated in a piloted fixed base UH-60 simulation. Pilot comments and statistics are presented to show the effectiveness of the cable angle feedback control system as compared to a baseline control system.
Flight control design and analysis requires an accurate flight dynamics model of the bare airframe and its associated uncertainties, as well as the integrated system model (block diagrams), across the frequency range of interest. Frequency response system identification methods have
proven to efficiently fulfill these modeling requirements in recent rotorcraft flight control applications. This paper presents integrated system identification methods for control law design with flight-test examples of the Fire Scout MQ-8B, S-76, and ARH-70A. The paper also looks toward
how system identification could be used in new modeling challenges such as large tilt-rotors and uniquely configured unmanned aircraft.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.