Robust Control Design for Handling Quality Improvement of Iced Full-scale Helicopter

Abstract

Degradation of handling qualities(HQs) due to bad weather or mechanical failure can pose a fatal risk to pilots unfamiliar with such situation. In particular, icing is an important issue to consider as it is a frequent cause of accidents. Most of the previous research works focuses on aerodynamic performance changes due to icing and the corresponding icing modeling or methods to prevent icing, whereas the present work attempts to actively compensate for HQ degradation due to icing on a full-scale helicopter through flight control law design. To this end, the present work first demonstrates HQ degradation due to icing using CONDUIT software, and subsequently presents a robust control design via the RS-LQR(Robust Servomechanism Linear Quadratic Regulation) procedure to compensate for the HQ degradation. Simulation results show that the proposed robust control maintains Level 1 HQ in the presence of icing.