Tethered Hover Test for Small Scaled Tilt-rotor UAV

축소형 틸트로터 무인기의 안전줄 호버 시험

Tilt rotor aircraft can take off and land vertically and cruise faster than any other helicopter. A scaled flight demonstration model of a tilt rotor aircraft has been developed by KARI. Because the flight characteristics of tilt rotor are not well known, the developed scaled model would be helpful to evaluate flight control algorithm of a full scale aircraft. The tethered hover test has been performed in order to improve hover flight characteristics of tilt rotor aircraft prior to flight test of the small scaled model. During the tethered hover test, the performance of rotor speed governor, rate SAS (Stability Augmentation System) and control surface mixers have been evaluated. We expect that the results of real flight hover test would be quite same as tethered hover test. Therefore the tethered hover test results will reduce the risk of flight test properly by fixing some of hidden problems which might occur during the flight test. This paper presents the results of tethered hover test in detail and shows how it could be final ground test before flight test. The control mixer gain and rate SAS feedback gains were modified in order to get higher controllability and stability during the tethered hover flight. The rotor governor showed that it could keep rotor RPM constant with very small deviation even during severe pilot collective input change. The tethered hover test results gave pilot and engineers confirmation and experience about the scheduled flight test.