A new hybrid control architecture to attenuate large horizontal wind disturbance for a small-scale unmanned helicopter

Abstract

This paper presents a novel method to attenuate large horizontal wind disturbance for a small-scale unmanned autonomous helicopter combining wind tunnel- based experimental data and a backstepping algorithm. Large horizontal wind disturbance is harmful to autonomous helicopters, especially to small ones because of their low inertia and the high cross-coupling effects among the multiple inputs. In order to achieve more accurate and faster attenuation of large wind disturbance, a new hybrid control architecture is proposed to take advantage of the direct force/moment compensation based on the wind tunnel experimental data. In this architecture, large horizontal wind disturbance is treated as an additional input to the control system instead of a small perturbation around the equilibrium state. A backstepping algorithm is then designed to guarantee the stable convergence of the helicopter to the desired position. The proposed technique is finally evaluated in simulation on the platform, HIROBO Eagle, compared with a traditional wind velocity compensation method. © 2012 Zhu et al.