Aggressive control of helicopters in presence of parametric and dynamical uncertainties

In this paper we focus on the validation of the nonlinear control structure, proposed in [Marconi L, Naldi R. Robust nonlinear full degree of freedom control of an helicopter. Automatica 2007;43:1909–20], for tracking arbitrary and even aggressive trajectories for small scale helicopters. We show how a systematic tuning procedure, which takes directly into account the aggressiveness of the references and the range of uncertainties of the model parameters, is able to succeed in enforcing the desired references signals. Simulations on a realistic dynamical model of small scale helicopters show the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy in presence of severe uncertainties. The paper is deliberately thought to be complementary to [Marconi L, Naldi R., 2007] to which the interested reader is referred for technical results and proofs of the tested control algorithm.