SDRE CONTROL WITH NONLINEAR FEEDFORWARD COMPENSATION FOR A SMALL UNMANNED HELICOPTER

In this paper we report on the state-dependent Riccati equation (SDRE) control of a small unmanned helicopter for autonomous agile maneuvering. SDRE control requires reformulation of the vehicle dynamics into a pseudo-linear form. For a helicopter application, however, this results in a number of terms not accounted in the SDRE design. To overcome this problem, we employ a nonlinear feedforward compensator that is designed to match the vehicle response to the model used in the SDRE design. This paper provides new control results and additonal details based on work described previously by Bogdanov, et al.1