The Instrumentation and Flight Testing of a Rotorcraft Vehicle for Undergraduate Flight Control Research

The University of Texas at San Antonio Control, Computation, and Cybernetics Laboratory has recently began an Undergraduate Researchers Control Program with the goal of recruiting, training, and retaining talented undergraduate students and exposing them to projects which reinforce their knowledge of control and system theory. The objective of this paper is to present the current results in the development and instrumentation of the Raptor 90 remote-controlled helicopter which is part of the Undergraduate Researchers Control Program. This paper will present the overall approach to down selecting, constructing, flight-testing, and outfitting a remote controlled helicopter for undergraduate flight control research. For the research currently being investigated at the C3 Laboratory, the Raptor 90 made by Thunder Tiger was selected for its relatively low price, large payload, and affordable maintenance. The construction of the Raptor 90 had to be weighed against financial constraints. The basic Raptor 90 Airframe already has a very aggressive flight envelope, yet by upgrading a series of Raptor 90 parts, the performance envelope was increased. Flight training for the Raptor 90 was performed by extensive flight time on the RealFlight G3 flight simulator. A Dynamic Testbed was built at the C3 Laboratory for both static and limited range hover testing during the initial flight testing of the Raptor 90. A flight test program was initiated for data collection and analysis of the Raptor 90. The Raptor 90 was instrumented with the Crossbow MicroNav IMU System and Stargate Processing Board. The Stargate allows the Raptor 90 to communicate wirelessly back to a base station and provide telemetry data of the Raptor 90’s states. Finally, by using a nonlinear MATLAB Simulation of the Raptor 50 that was modified for the Raptor 90, a pseduospectral open loop controller was implemented.