Full Flight Envelope Inner Loop Control Law Development for the Unmanned K-MAX

Abstract

Using Rotorcraft Unmanned Aerial Vehicles to deliver supplies to forward ground units in high-threat environments can lead to increases in optempo, enlarge the area of operation, and significantly reduce risk by eliminating pilot safety considerations.The goal of the work presented here was to develop and flight test full flight envelope inner-loop control laws for the autonomous version of the Kaman K-MAX helicopter. The work included the identification of bare-airframe mathematical models of the aircraft from flight data and combining them with a Simulink representation of the control laws to develop adetailed analysis model. This analysis model was then validated against closed-loop flight test data and used to generate optimized control system gains for hover and forward flight, at both low and high altitudes. These gains were flight tested through representative mission scenarios and shown to provide improved mission performance.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
May 03, 2011
Accession Number
AD1021688

Entities

People

  • James W Bacon
  • Keith E Rothman
  • Kenny K Cheung
  • Marcos G Berrios
  • Mark B. Tischler
  • Michael D Bielefield
  • Mohammadreza H. Mansur

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Air Platforms
  • Autonomy
  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes
  • Space
  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Aircrafts
  • Airframes
  • Bandwidth
  • Closed Loop Systems
  • Control Systems
  • Flight Control Systems
  • Frequency Domain
  • Frequency Response
  • Ground Control Stations
  • High Altitude
  • Low Altitude
  • Mathematical Models
  • Models
  • Reliability
  • Test And Evaluation
  • Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
  • Unmanned Ground Vehicles

Readers

  • Aerospace Engineering
  • Aerospace logistics and air mobility.
  • Robotics and Automation.

Technology Areas

  • Autonomy
  • Autonomy - Autonomous System Control