New Helicopter Pilot Robot for Manned Aircrafts

TapTechNews September 18th news, a team led by Professor Li Daochun and Academician Xiang Jinwu from Beihang University published a paper titled RobotPilot: A New Autonomous System Toward Flying Manned Aerial Vehicles in the journal Engineering, introducing the new helicopter pilot robot they developed.

The core of this research is a new type of robot system that can independently pilot manned helicopters, thus forming a new type of unmanned flight system.

The research team discussed in detail the concept and advantages of the aircraft pilot robot, and proposed a helicopter pilot robot for manned helicopters. The robot designed a servo mechanism for the pilot robot according to the control characteristics of the helicopter control mechanism, and based on the kinematic analysis of the robot servo mechanism, a robot flight controller of the direct drive method was established to reduce the time delay and control error in the robot servo process.

The research team also constructed a ground station system that supports different flight modes and functional integration. Eventually, they designed and manufactured a prototype of the helicopter pilot robot and installed it on the helicopter for flight tests. The test results showed that the robot can independently complete forward flight, backward flight, lateral flight, and turning flight, verifying its effectiveness.

The innovation of this research lies in that it uses a non-intrusive conversion method, enabling manned aircraft to be quickly and reversibly converted into unmanned aircraft systems. This method not only retains the load capacity and safety level of the original aircraft, but also avoids the need for complex modifications to the original aircraft. In addition, this pilot robot can also serve as a co-pilot, improving the automation level of existing aircraft and providing a research platform for emerging technologies such as pilot assistants and intelligent cockpits.

In terms of experimental verification, the research team installed the prototype of the pilot robot on the SVH-4 light training helicopter and conducted ground tests and flight tests. The test results showed that the pilot robot can quickly and accurately control the control mechanism of the helicopter, and perform excellently in flight tasks such as hovering, forward flight, backward flight, lateral flight, and turning.

Although significant results have been achieved, the research team pointed out that there is an obvious attitude oscillation problem in the control process of the pilot robot. They plan to further improve the control performance and adaptability of the pilot robot in future work, considering the deployment of model-based modern control methods or intelligent control methods to optimize flight performance.

TapTechNews attached the paper link:

http://doi.org/10.1016/j.eng.2022.10.018