Experimental Results on Robust Attitude Control of a 3-DOF Helicopter under Wind Disturbances

Helicopter is a typical strongly coupled nonlinear complex system, and the design of its attitude controller is challenging. Helicopter flight performances can easily be affected by wind gusts especially when they are executing aggressive tasks. Furthermore, actuator input saturation can also influence helicopter attitude control performance. Considering these problems, this paper firstly establishes a helicopter dynamics model with the consideration of input saturation constraint, and then H
_∞
performance is applied to design a robust controller in order to improve the wind resistance of helicopter. Finally, the designed attitude robust controller effectiveness is validated. Experimental results demonstrate that compared with the PID and LQR methods, the proposed control strategy can better suppress the adverse effects of wind disturbances.