HELICOPTER HANDLING QUALITIES STUDIES USING PILOT MODELLING AND INVERSE SIMULATION

A collaborative programme of research into helicopter handling qualities and mission effectiveness is currently underway in the UK, involving the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency, Glasgow Caledonian University and the University of Glasgow. This paper presents one contributing element to the programme, carried out at the University of Glasgow. The practice of using mathematical models to simulate pilot behaviour in one-axis stabilisation tasks is a well known conventional simulation problem. In this paper an accepted mathematical model of a pilot is used as the controller of a rudimentary helicopter model. Test manoeuvre data from inverse simulation is used to provide time-histories for forcing functions to the pilot/helicopter system, and a constrained optimisation routine is utilised to obtain values for the pilot gain and lead/lag equalisation parameters. It will be shown that as the theoretical pilot is required to ‘fly’ different manoeuvres, or indeed if the level of manoeuvre aggression is varied, the ‘pilot’ adjusts these parameters to perform a tracking task in compensatory control. The paper considers initially the pilot and helicopter models and subsequently analyses the whole system, illustrating how the pilot model changes with different situations.