Autonomous flight control system for longitudinal motion of a helicopter

This paper presents a flight control design for longitudinal motion of helicopter to establish autopilot techniques of helicopter-type unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The characteristics of the linearized equation of the helicopter is changed during a specified flight mission because the trim values of the nonlinear equation are also varied. In this paper, the longitudinal motion of the helicopter is modeled by a linear interpolative polytopic model whose varying parameter is the flight velocity. A flight control systems with a gain scheduling state feedback law is designed to stabilize the vehicle and track a reference which realizes the flight mission. The effectiveness of the proposed flight control system is evaluated by computer simulation.