Software and hardware environments for simulation and verification of an autonomous flight control based on fuzzy logic control for small unmanned helicopter

Unmanned helicopter is an air vehicle with high dynamic motions. The development of the autonomous flight control for unmanned helicopters is limited by the inherent instability and the nonlinearity of its dynamic model. The objective of this paper is to build a development environment for the autonomous flight control of unmanned helicopters. At the beginning of the study, a software-in-the-loop (SIL) simulation system was implemented. Then, fuzzy logic control (FLC) was adopted and employed to demonstrate the autonomous flight of a target radio-controlled (RC) helicopter in a flight simulator, X-plane. Finally, a Hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation system was built to verify the performance of the developed autonomous flight control system for two flight modes, altitude hold and position fixed modes. The results of the simulations reveal that the developed simulation environment is viable for the development of the autonomous flight control system for unmanned helicopters.