Robust autonomous helicopter stabilizer tuned by particle swarm optimization

Abstract

Autonomous helicopter stabilization in the presence of a wind disturbance is presented. A controller is designed based on the nonlinear adaptive output regulation and robust stabilization of a chain of integrators by a saturated feedback to stabilize the position and velocity of a helicopter. The controller is able to adaptively estimate the wind disturbance whose measurements are not made available. In addition to robustness against the external disturbance input the control design is carried out to handle helicopter parameter uncertainties. The cost of the robustly stabilizing control strategy is the challenge to tune 13 controller parameters for a desired output response. Particle swarm optimization (PSO), a metaheuristic optimization algorithm is applied to automate the tuning process. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control and tuning methods in the robust stabilization of the helicopter motion.