Experiment platform for pan-tilt control of a small scale autonomous helicopter

To analyze the characteristic of an onboard pan-tilt control system to enable an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to Track a ground target, and to verify the stability of the tracking controller and to test the performance of the controller, an experiment platform for pan-tilt control of a small scale autonomous helicopter is designed and then implemented. The system consists of four components including the model of the helicopter, pan-tilt camera, onboard equipment and ground control center. Moreover, the control software is developed by using C++ based on the Visual Studio environment, where multi-threading technique is adopted to make the modules independent of each other. The system not only reliably reflects the dynamics of a practical pan-tilt control system of a small scale autonomous helicopter, but also provides friendly user interface which brings much convenience to implemented and then tested various control strategies. Finally, all the function modules are tested in the ground and air condition respectively, and the obtained experiment results demonstrates the reliability of the system.