Integrated Flight Path Planning System and Flight Control System for Navigation and Guidance of Unmanned Helicopter
Lin Yh · 2009
In recent years, Unmanned Helicopter plays more important roles in different countries; it is used in many aspects of military and civil broadly. This paper focuses on the design of a navigation and guidance system for unmanned helicopter using A-Star path planning algorithm to develop a Flight Path Planning System (FPPS), this platform can compute a proper and adaptive flight path for distinct flight conditions. The FPPS can add a forbidden matrix to inhibit unmanned helicopter from flying into a dangerous zone. Multi-Resolution Scheme is used for reducing the computation time. In addition, Path Smoothing Methods are applied to improve the flight path quality. Meanwhile, this paper also constructs a Flight Control System (FCS) which is the Fuzzy Inference System (FIS) based on the fuzzy logic, and integrated FCS method with the FPPS to navigate and guide unmanned helicopter to the destination. Among these, this system is developed by coupling the flight simulation software – X-Plane and the computing software – MATLAB to perform the real-time simulation to verify and demonstrate the system performance.