State Estimation for a Small Scale Flybar-less Helicopter

Unmanned helicopters have been used extensively in the last few decades as a research platform for different applications. Flybarless, single-rotor helicopters are famous for their increased agility and high maneuverability, which makes them a suitable platform for many challenging applications. This paper is concerned with the problem of attitude and flapping angles estimation of a flybar-less small scale single rotor helicopter. A nonlinear model for the Maxi Joker 3 helicopter is used to simulate test data. A Kalman filter is designed and implemented to estimate both the attitude and the flapping angles of the helicopter. Results are shown at the end of the paper to validate the performance of the proposed approach.