Abstract
For unmanned helicopters to be used in industrial applications, autonomous flight control is necessary. This study aims to shorten the time required to tune a controller and design a stable control system for model variation of unmanned multi-rotor helicopters. Designing model based controllers requires a significant amount of time and effort for model identification and the tuning of controller parameters. Additionally, changes in the dynamics of the plant lead to deterioration of control performance. In this paper, we design indirect model reference adaptive control having on-line system identification mechanism for change-of-altitude direction of a helicopter to solve the problems that have been presented. In order to guarantee the minimum phase property of the altitude model, we use the delta operator for system identification. We demonstrate the validity of the proposed control system by way of a flight experiment. The experimental result shows we were able to design a highly precise altitude controller in about 15 seconds.
