Platform and State Estimation Design of a Small-Scale UAV Helicopter System

This paper presents the development of a small-scale unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) helicopter system based on a Raptor 90 hobby helicopter. Firstly, onboard avionics system and ground station are designed carefully. The onboard avionics system mainly consists of sensors, flight control board, RF modem, and power supply system. The ground station comprises a computer and a RF modem. The main function of ground station is to monitor the status of onboard avionics. To avoid the effect of noises, some efficient sensor data processing and integrated navigation algorithms are designed and implemented on the onboard avionics. As a result, the constructed system exhibits low weight, small size, antivibration, and low power consumption; the essential information for system identification and automatic control can be easily acquired. Several ground and flight tests have been performed to verify the feasibility and reliability of the total system. The results show that it is sufficient for system identification and automatic control. © 2013 Shuai Tang et al.