An implement of RPV control system for small unmanned helicopters

This paper has presented an implementation of a RPV control system for a small unmanned helicopter. Both the hardware and the software of the UAV have been described in detail. An EKF-based GPS/INS navigation system is developed with low-cost inertial sensors and a GPS receiver. A chaos-genetic algorithm is proposed in the system identification of the helicopter. A LQG-based RPV (Remotely Piloted Vehicle) control scheme is applied in the control system. The airline flight of the control system has been verified by a hardware-in-loop simulation environment. Real flight experiment is also carried out to test the performance of the RPV control system. It can be concluded that, besides the stable control of attitude, the proposed system is also able to track the target velocity quickly and realize the RPV control of the small unmanned helicopter.