Real-Time Simulation and Control of Helicopter Systems

This paper proposes intelligent techniques to control the strong nonlinear coupling between the motor rotors and achieve stability during the operation of two degree of freedom (2DoF) helicopter system. Initially, a brief study is carried out to compare the operation of various controllers on the helicopter system. The observations depicted that, the response of the classical controllers is limited in terms of various performance characteristics, especially when subjected to helicopter balancing. Hence, this paper develops a fuzzy logic controller and a fuzzy-PID controller which controls the pitch and yaw motion of the system. The pitch and yaw angle control results has been validated on Simulink and on a test rig. The performance of the controllers is measured in terms of peak overshoot, steady-state error, settling time.