Flight Control System Design and Autonomous Flight Control of Small-Scale Unmanned Helicopter Based on Nanosensors

Abstract

Due to the limitation of the size and power, micro unmanned aerial vehicle (MUAV) usually has a small load capacity. Aiming at the problems of limited installation space and easy being interfered in flight attitude measurement of the small-scale unmanned helicopter (SUH), a low-cost and lightweight flight control system of the SUH based on ARM Cortex-M4 core microcontroller and Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) sensors is developed in this paper. On this basis, in order to realize the autonomous flight control of SUH, firstly, the mathematical model of the SUH is given by using the Newton-Euler formulation. Secondly, a cascade flight controller consisting of the attitude controller and the position controller is developed based on linear active disturbance rejection control (LADRC) and proportional-integral-derivative (PID) control. Furthermore, simulations are conducted to validate the performance of the attitude controller and the position controller in MATLAB/SIMULINK simulation environment. Finally, based on the Align T-REX 470L SUH experimental platform, the hovering experiment and the route flight experiment are also carried out to validate the performance of the designed flight control system hardware and the proposed control algorithm. The results show that the flight control system designed in this paper has high reliability and strong anti-interference ability, and the control algorithm can effectively and reliably realize the attitude stabilization control and route control of the SUH, with high control accuracy and small error.