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 a detailed 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.