Experimental results on robust tracking control of a lab helicopter under wind disturbances

The flight performances of an unmanned helicopter can be affected by wind gusts when they are taking aggressive missions. In this paper, the position control problem is investigated under unknown wind disturbances for a laboratory helicopter. A robust controller is designed in two steps: firstly, a static linear feedback controller is applied to get exact tracking for the nominal system; then, a robust compensator is introduced to reduce the effects of the uncertainties. It is proven that the tracking error can be guaranteed to converge to the neighborhood of the origin with designated boundary. Experimental results on the helicopter are also given to confirm the effectiveness of the method.