System identification and control of a small unmanned helicopter at hover mode

Acquiring the dynamic model of a helicopter is one of the most important requirement before the design of an autonomous model-based flight control. The objective of the study is to identify the pitch, roll, heave, and yaw dynamic models of the used virtual helicopter, Raptor, in X-Plane flight simulator. A software-in-the-loop (SIL) was then developed by using all estimated models. In this study, the subspace method and prediction error method (PEM) were investigated to identify the dynamic models. The model predictive control (MPC) was adopted to perform the autonomous control in SIL. The results demonstrated that the proposed approach is viable for the autonomous flight control for the small helicopter.