Situational awareness based on neural control of an autonomous helicopter during hovering manoeuvres

This paper focuses on a critical component of the situational awareness, the neural network control of autonomous vertical flight for an unmanned aerial vehicle. Application of the proposed two stage flight strategy which uses two autonomous adaptive neural dynamical feedback controllers was carried out for a nontrivial small-scale helicopter model comprising five states, two inputs and two outputs. This control strategy for chosen helicopter model has been verified by simulation of hovering manoeuvres using software package Simulink and demonstrated good performance for fast situational awareness in real-time search-and-rescue operations.