Design and implementation of stability augmentation system for remote-control helicopter

Remote-control model helicopter is an agile aircraft, but inherently, is also an unstable system. To hande this inherent instability property, this paper intends to design and implement a helicopter flight control system in order to increase the safety and stability of helicopter. The whole flight control system consists of two parts: hardware and software. The hardware system includes the plant which is the remote-control helicopter to be controlled, the gyros for sensing body attitude, and the on-board computer. The software system implements the flight control law using fuzzy logic, and performs real-time computation to generate conrol command for actuators, which, in turn, drive the control surfaces to the desired positions in order to stabilize the helicopter motion. The flight tests justify the feasibility and validity of the proposed helicopter flight control architecutre.