Increasing Performance of Autopilot Guided Small Unmanned Helicopter

In this paper, autonomous performance of a small
manufactured unmanned helicopter is tried to be increased. For this
purpose, a small unmanned helicopter is manufactured in Erciyes
University, Faculty of Aeronautics and Astronautics. It is called as
ZANKA-Heli-I. For performance maximization, autopilot parameters
are determined via minimizing a cost function consisting of flight
performance parameters such as settling time, rise time, overshoot
during trajectory tracking. For this purpose, a stochastic optimization
method named as simultaneous perturbation stochastic approximation
is benefited. Using this approach, considerable autonomous
performance increase (around %23) is obtained.

Authors:

• Tugrul Oktay
• Mehmet Konar
• Mustafa Soylak
• Firat Sal
• Murat Onay
• Orhan Kizilkaya

Keywords:

• Small helicopters
• hierarchical control
• stochastic optimization
• autonomous performance maximization
• autopilots.

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