The Research On Flight Control And 3D Visual Flight Simulation Platform Of The Unmanned Helicopter

The unmanned helicopters have some unique characteristics such as vertical take-off and landing, hovering, and low-speed flight at low altitudes. Helicopters are widely used in military and civil fields. However, the researches on the unmanned helicopters are still being developed, especially on the control algorithms and 3D simulation. Since unmanned helicopter is a non-linear, strong coupling, complex system, and affected by the environment, which is difficult to control. Hence, the researches of the helicopters are very significative in theoretical and practical fields.The autonomous control researches on the unmanned helicopter were started from 1950 s in the foreign countries, a lot of algorithms had been used in the control system such as dynamic inverse control, adaptive control and neural network control and so on. However, almost all the algorithms can not be used in actual flight control because of these complexities. We find a certain gap with technologies between China and foreign countries when we start researches. So the design of the autonomous flight controller is much more important.At present, the PID controller still continues to be widely used in the flight control. However, the pure PID controller is a linear controller, which can be stable in the small angle near the equilibrium point, and can not achieve the perfect control quality(e.g. fast response to input command and anti-interference ability) required by small unmanned helicopter motion control. Hence, the effective algorithm for the helicopter is necessary. In this paper, we establish the model of helicopter first. And the autonomous controller is developed on the base of the model. It can achieve the goals of the trajectory tracking and anti-jamming. The autonomous controller is divided into attitude controller and position controller. The attitude controller and the height controller develop into a simple algorithm combing with the CMAC and PID to maintain the stability in the noises. The position controller develops the fuzzy control method to track the trajectory. The control system can achieve a perfect control effect by using the MATLAB.The MATLAB simulation can not reflect the effect of flight intuitively. However, the real helicopter is expensive and dangerous. In this paper, we design the 3D simulation platform based on OpenGL, and the intuitive simulation platform is presented combing the 3D platform with MATLAB controller. We also reserve the interface of wireless communication to be ready for the visualization on the actual flight.