Nonlinear cascaded control of a small unmanned helicopter and stability analysis

This is the paper style requirement for the Chinese Control Conference. The writers of papers should and must provide normalized electronic documents in order for readers to search and read papers conveniently. Considering the structural features of unmanned helicopters, the present paper designs a nonlinear cascaded controller based on inner-outer loop structure. The outer loop controls the translational trajectory of the helicopter, while the inner loop stabilizes the attitude. The intermediate control signals related to the attitude dynamics exploit the structural properties of the transform matrix. The controller for each loop is designed separately so that the design problem is simplified and the control system can be implemented easily in practice. Then the global stability of the connected system is proven. Finally, numerical simulations are conducted to show the applicability and the effectiveness of the proposed design.