• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
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• v.37 no.6
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• pp.342-351
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• 2012

Purpose: Aerial spraying with an agricultural unmanned helicopter became a new paradigm in the agricultural practice. Laterally tilting behavior of a conventional agricultural helicopter, resulting in the biased down-wash and uneven spray deposit is a physically intrinsic phenomenon while hovering and cruise flights. Authors studied and developed a roll-balanced agricultural helicopter with a raised pylon tail rotor system. In this study, the attitude of the roll-balanced helicopter was determined using the Kalman filter algorithm, and the quality of roll balancing of a bare-airframe helicopter was evaluated. Methods: Instantaneous attitudes were estimated using the advantage of gyroscope, followed by the long term correction and prediction using accelerometer data for the advantage of convergence. The attitudes of the fuselage were calculated by applying the Kalman filter algorithm. The spraying maneuver of the helicopter was performed at a field of 50 m long, and the attitude data were acquired and evaluated. Results: The determination of attitude using the inertial measurement unit(IMU) and Kalman filter was reliable and practical. The intrinsic attitude of the developed helicopter was stable and roll-balanced. The deviation of roll angle was ${\pm}6.3^{\circ}$ with an average of $0^{\circ}$, referring to roll-balanced. Conclusions: Handling quality of the roll attitude determined to be steadily balanced. The balancing behavior of the developed helicopter would result in an even spray pattern during aerial application.

• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
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• v.35 no.5
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• pp.302-309
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• 2010

Aerial application using an unmanned agricultural helicopter would allow precise and timely spraying. The attitude of a helicopter depends on a number of dynamic variables for roll-balanced flight. Laterally tilting behavior of a helicopter is a physically intrinsic phenomenon while hovering and forwarding. In order to balance the fuselage, the rotor should be counter-tilted, resulting in the biased down-wash. The biased spraying toward right side causes uneven spray pattern. In this study, a raised tail rotor system for the roll-balanced helicopter was studied. Thrust of the tail rotor system was measured and theoretically estimated for the fundamental database of the roll-balanced helicopter design. The estimated tail thrust and roll-moment would be used to design the raising height of tail rotor and roll balancing dynamics. The unmanned agricultural helicopter required the tail rotor thrust of about 39.2 N (4.0 kgf) during hovering with a payload of 235.4 N (24 kgf). A raised tail rotor system would compensate for the physical tilt phenomena. A further attitude control system of helicopter would assist roll-balanced aerial spray application.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.275-284
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• 2012

This paper proposes an attitude and direction control of a single wheel balanced robot. A unicycle robot is controlled by two independent control laws: the mobile inverted pendulum control method for pitch axis and the reaction wheel pendulum control method for roll axis. It is assumed that both roll dynamics and pitch dynamics are decoupled. Therefore the roll and pitch dynamics are obtained independently considering the interaction as disturbances to each other. Each control law is implemented by a controller separately. The unicycle robot has two DC motors to drive the disk for roll and to drive the wheel for pitch. Since there is no force to change the yaw direction, the present paper proposes a method for changing the yaw direction. The angle data are obtained by a fusion of a gyro sensor and an accelerometer. Experimental results show the performance of the controller and verify the effectiveness of the proposed control algorithm.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.20 no.7
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• pp.695-700
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• 2014

In this paper, we utilize the CMG's momentum bias to control the roll/pitch attitude of the Quad-rotor. While the previous control approaches have used the thrust control approach, we design and add a new momentum controller (using CMG) in order to improve the transient response over the existing methods. The focal point of this paper is the design of a controller for a Quad-rotor's attitude using CMG. This leads to other tasks such as an identification of the model's parameters and mathematical nonlinear modeling. Then, the previous thrust controller is designed based on the linearized model. Finally, the overall system with our designed controller is implemented and tested in real time to show that the Quad-rotor is kept in a good balanced position faster than the traditional thrust-only control approach.