Full Flight Envelope Inner Loop Control Law Development for the Unmanned K-MAX

Using Rotorcraft Unmanned Aerial Vehicles to deliver supplies to forward ground units in high-threat environments can lead to increases in optempo, enlarge the area of operation, and significantly reduce risk by eliminating pilot safety considerations.The goal of the work presented here was to develop and flight test full flight envelope inner-loop control laws for the autonomous version of the Kaman K-MAX helicopter. The work included the identification of bare-airframe mathematical models of the aircraft from flight data and combining them with a Simulink representation of the control laws to develop adetailed analysis model. This analysis model was then validated against closed-loop flight test data and used to generate optimized control system gains for hover and forward flight, at both low and high altitudes. These gains were flight tested through representative mission scenarios and shown to provide improved mission performance. American Helicopter Society 67th Annual Forum , 03 May 2011, 05 May 2011,