An Experimental Test Bed for Small Unmanned Helicopters

This paper introduces a custom experimental test bed for the evaluation of autonomous flight controllers for unmanned helicopters. The development of controllers for unmanned helicopters is a difficult procedure which involves testing through simulation at first, and then actual experimentation on real vehicles. As simulation cannot accurately represent the exact real flight conditions and the dangers involved in them, the suggested test bed fills the gap between simulation runs and experimental flights. The developed system involves a small helicopter mounted on a flying stand, equipped with a set of sensors for real-time flight monitoring and control. For demonstration purposes, the test bed has been used for design and validation of a fuzzy logic based autopilot, able to perform hovering and altitude control. Experimental results are presented and commented for various test cases.