Indoor autonomous hovering control for a small unmanned coaxial helicopter

Abstract

For the nonlinear and open-loop unstable characteristics of the small helicopter, autonomous flight control is a challenging problem. In order to reduce the complexity of the helicopter autonomous control, this paper constructs an indoor autonomous flight control platform for a small coaxial helicopter ESky LAMA4, which is convenient for data collection, data analysis and control law design. Firstly, the Vicon Mx Motion Capture System is installed to obtain the attitudes and positions of the coaxial helicopter. Secondly, a PCTx converter for the radio controller is used to convert the control commands into PPM signals which are sent into the radio controller. Hence the attitude and translational motion can be controlled. Then in the inner attitude loop and outer translational loop, several PID controllers are designed for the autonomous hovering control of the small coaxial helicopter. Finally the flight results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach, which can be adopted into the study of small unmanned helicopters in the future.

Chemically doped graphene based ternary field effect transistors

“…Multi-valued logic (MVL) architecture can reduce the power consumption because it simplifies circuits and reduces the number of interconnects per the same level of functionality compared to the Boolean architecture. MVL devices such as carbon nanotube FETs (CNTFETs), 1,2) single electron transistors, 3,4) quantum dot FETs, [5][6][7] and resonant tunneling transistors 8) have been widely studied for more than five decades, but most of these devices are too complex to fabricate or only work at cryogenic temperature. Even in the case of the CNTFETs, most of the reported studies are based only on theoretical simulations.…”

Dynamic modelling and control of a cubic flying blimp using external motion capture

“…A number of studies use such data to validate a numerical model by comparing the trajectories resulting from input forces to the system. 19,20 To avoid the instability of the required differentiation (speed and acceleration from Vicon position data), an alternative approach is used here. From different data sets obtained using different paths, we instead compare the motor commands of the model to those of the real physical system.…”

Modelling and Multivariable Control Techniques for Small Coaxial Helicopters

“…The above modeling techniques are used to investigate PID, LQR and H ∞ controller designs on a platform developed by the authors. All three controller designs are well established in the literature, with PID control on small coaxial helicopters first introduced by Watanabe et al 9 and further developed by Wu et al 10 using vision sensors. However, both works design and implement these controllers on conventional R/C helicopters with a few states already controlled by onboard electronics and no access to the actual platform actuators.…”