Point navigation guidance for small unmanned helicopter under predicting future position

Abstract

Following the path of an autonomous, an agile vehicle in a dynamic environment is a very complex problem, especially one is required to use its full maneuvering capabilities facing crosswind condition. To resolve this issue, using bank angle to change direction of helicopter is the new trend of the current researches. This paper introduces a new point navigation guidance law which is useful for the control of the unmanned helicopter. Predicting the future position, generating the guidance law and commanding the heading are used as means of input. The suggested method differs from the conventional guidance law which is directly used the reorienting logic in the direction of flight velocity instead of directly applying bank angle. Results of simulation show that the proposed law correctly guides an unmanned helicopter along the path within a given area. Also the flight test verified the effectiveness and performance of the proposed guidance law. The proposed guidance law can be extended to the collision avoidance with a minor tuning of law.