Autonomous Navigation, Guidance and Control of Small Electric Helicopter

Abstract

In this study, we design an autonomous navigation, guidance and control system for a small electric helicopter. Only small, light-weight, and inaccurate sensors can be used for the control of small helicopters because of the payload limitation. To overcome the problem of inaccurate sensors, a composite navigation system is designed. The designed navigation system enables us to precisely obtain the position and velocity of the helicopter. A guidance and control system is designed for stabilizing the helicopter at an arbitrary point in three-dimensional space. In particular, a novel and simple guidance system is designed using the combination of optimal control theory and quaternion kinematics. The designs of the study are validated experimentally, and the experimental results verify the efficiency of our navigation, guidance and control system for a small electric helicopter.

Survey of computer vision algorithms and applications for unmanned aerial vehicles

“…Visual Servoing (VS) is the process of using the information that are obtained by the visual sensors as a feedback in the vehicle (UAV) control system. Different inner-loop control systems have been employed to achieve the stabilization of the UAVs, such as PID ( Golightly & Jones, 2005;Kada & Gazzawi, 2011;Martin, 2012 ), optimal control ( Suzuki, Ishii, Okada, Iizuka, & Kawamur, 2013 ), sliding mode ( Lee, Ryan, & Kim, 2012 ), fuzzy logic ( Limnaios & Tsourveloudis, 2012 ), and cascade control structure ( Bergerman, Amidi, Miller, Vallidis, & Dudek, 2007 ). References; such as Wagtendonk (2006) , Beard and McLain (2012) , Elkaim, Lie, and Gebre-Egziabher (2015) provide detailed information about the principles and theories related to the UAV flight controlling.…”

Design Genetic Algorithm Optimization Education Software based Fuzzy Controller for a Tricopter Fly Path Planning

“…The waypoints are helped to define invisible routing paths for advanced navigational systems such as the Global Positioning System (GPS) (Suzuki, 2013), in which the users would easily monitor the vehicle position. The autopilot controllers tune autonomous flight waypoint tracking in preparation for advanced navigation research.…”

“…Waypoints (named also is Point of Interest "POI") are the sets of coordinates that identify a point in physical space. It is usually used to express the desired autonomous vehicle trajectory (Castillo, 2007, Borhaug, 2005, Suzuki, 2013. Waypoints nowadays are more often allied with physical artifacts created specifically for navigation activities such as radio beacons, buoys, satellites and the control points.…”

Attitude heading reference algorithm based on transformed cubature Kalman filter

“…1 The navigation system using inertial sensors (strapdown inertial navigation system (SINS)) has become one of the most important systems for UAV with its high degree of autonomy. 2 Micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) gyroscope and accelerometer have been used in navigation system due to its small size and low power consumption. 3 Attitude Heading Reference System (AHRS) using MEMS accelerometer and magnetic sensor as measurement sensors and Kalman filter for attitude estimation is an effective method for attitude estimation of UAV.…”