Development of Approximate Prediction Model for 3-DOF Helicopter and Benchmarking with Existing Controllers

Abstract

Recent trend of living is getting modernized rapidly by the involvement of automatic systems. Within the aviation industry, automatic systems had become heavily reliable by the end of the nineteen centuries. The systems usually require controllable devices with desired control algorithm known as controller. Controllers can be replaced with, almost every mechanical automation aspect where, safety is a serious issue. But it is not easy to adapt a controller with a specific model at the beginning. It is important to predict the model before a controller works on the model and the controller parameters need to be adapted to get maximum efficiency. A 3-DOF (Three Degrees of Freedom) airframe model is an advanced benchmark model of real 3-DOF helicopter. It has the same uncommon model dynamics with nonlinearities, strong duel motor cross coupling system, uncertain characteristics, disturbances dependent, unmodeled dynamics and many more. The 3-DOF airframe model is a well-known platform for controller performance benchmarking. This research paper shows the development of an approximate prediction model of a Three Degrees of Freedom helicopter model and uses the proposed approximate model to observe the performance of an existent hybrid controller. The hybrid controller is the combination of two different controllers named Quantitative Feedback Theory (QFT) controller and Adaptive controller. To achieve the research objective, the proposed mathematical model of this airframe was used to develop transfer function and simulate with the hybrid controller in MATLAB. The performance of the controller based on the proposed heliframe model of 3-DOF helicopter have also been reported added within this paper.