Evaluation and Comparison of TRMS Performance for Classical and Optimal Control Strategies

The Twin Rotor MIMO System is a model that has dynamics similar to that of a helicopter, which makes it a very interesting system for research purposes. It has two rotors and is also known as the “Helicopter Lab Model”. This paper discusses the mathematical modeling of TRMS along with its performance comparison for different control schemes. A conventional PID controller is first designed followed by different optimal controllers including Linear Quadratic Integral (LQI) and Kalman filter estimation for Linear Quadratic Gaussian (LQG). A comparative study of the designed controllers is then performed for both linear and non-linear models with the simulation results confirming the effectiveness of the proposed control strategies.