21st Congress of International Council of the Aeronautical Sciences, Melbourne, Australia, 13-18 September, 1998
Paper ICAS-98-R.1.10

HELICOPTER REDUNDANT STATION KEEPING FLIGHT CONTROL LAW

Oliva A. P.
Instituto de Aeronautica e Espaco (IAE), Brasil

Keywords: helicopter, redundant station keeping, flight control law

A proposal about how to implement a helicopter flight control system designed by linear quadratic method without the use of as many sensors as states required by the control law and maintaining the same flight performance of the basic system as also introducing analytical redundancy in the system is presented. The analytical redundancy allows to have a half of the sensors required to use the designed flight control law. The idea is applied to the helicopter dynamics without the rotor dynamics effects and also to the helicopter dynamics with coupling effects due to the rotor dynamics. Comparison between the optimal control law and the proposed simplification is analysed with respect to flying qualities and also with respect to stability characteristics.

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