Vertical modeling and autonomous landing of a mini unmanned helicopter

By analyzing the physical and aerodynamic principles, the vertical dynamics of a mini unmanned helicopter is modeled, and from which the analytic form of linearized model is derived out. A vertical velocity controller is designed based on this model, which scheduled by a multilevel finite state machine (FSM). In the addition, an effective autonomous landing programming method with effectively utilizing several sensors is proposed. A mount of flight experimental results have shown that the designed controller and programming method can successfully perform autonomous landing flights on several grounds of specific characteristics.