Control system design and testing for a small‐scale autonomous helicopter

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to conduct the design, development and testing of a controller for an autonomous small‐scale helicopter.Design/methodology/approach – The hardware in the loop simulation (HILS) platform is developed based on the nonlinear model of JR Voyager G‐260 small‐scale helicopter. Autonomous controllers are verified using the HILS environment prior to flight experiments.Findings – The gains of the multi‐loop cascaded control architecture can be effectively optimized within the HILS environment. Various autonomous flight operations are achieved and it is demonstrated that the prediction from the simulations is in a good agreement with the result from the flight test.Research limitations/implications – The synthesized controller is effective for the particular test‐bed. For other small‐scale helicopters (with different size and engine specifications), the controller gains must be tuned again.Practical implications – This work represents a practical control design and testing pro...