Hierarchical Control Design of a strongUAVstrong Helicopter.pdfVIP

12 Hierarchical Control Design of a UAV Helicopter Ali Karimoddini, Guowei Cai, Ben M. Chen, Hai Lin, Tong H. Lee Graduate School for Integrative Sciences and Engineering (NGS) and Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore Singapore 1. Introduction Nowadays, control design of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has emerged as an attractive research area, due to the wide range of UAV applications in various military and civilian areas such as terrain and utility inspections, coordinated surveillance, search and rescue missions, disaster monitoring, rapid emergency response, aerial mapping, traffic monitoring, and reconnaissance missions (see, e.g., (Metni et al., 2007), (Kuroki et al., 2010 ), (Campbell Campbell, 2010 )). They can also be used as complex test-bed dynamic systems for implementation and verification of the control schemes for different research purposes (Kim Sukkarieh, 2007), (Saripalli et al., 2003), (Bortoff, 1999). Several research groups are involved in the modeling and control of UAVs (Bortoff, 1999), (Gavrilets et al., 2000), (Cai et al., 2006). The control methods such as the neural network approach (Enns Si, 2003), the differential geometry method (Isidori et al., 2003), feedback control with decoupling approach (Peng et al., 2009), and the model predictive approach (Shim et al., 2003) have been applied for the flight control of the UAV helicopters. In this chapter, however, we have used an analytical approach to design and analyze the whole system including the inner-loop and the outer-loop controllers for a small-scale UAV helicopter. Here, in the proposed hierarchical structure, the inner-loop is