Adaptive Control of 3DOF Motion for LAAS Helicopter Benchmark: Design and Experiments

The problem of 3DOF motion control for Quanser/LAAS "Helicopter Benchmark" laboratory setup is considered. Based on the passification design method and the Implicit Reference Model approach, the adaptive control laws are designed and experimentally tested. The MATLAB/Simulink and WinCon software environments are used for adaptive control laws implementation and conducting the real-world experiments. The experimental results demonstrate high closed loop system performance and robustness of the suggested control laws with respect to parametric uncertainties and unmodeled plant dynamics and external disturbances. An important advantage of adaptive control is simplicity of the design procedure compared to conventional model based approach.