HILSIM Design Using Wireless Communication

In this paper, we designed a hardware-in-the-loop simulation system to develop a dynamic model and controller for a small-scale helicopter. Using wireless connection, we designed a cheap and light weight flight control system that controls the helicopter according to the command from the ground laptop computer. The ground computer calculates the control command using the sensor information from the helicopter through wireless connection and sends the command back to the flight control computer. Thus the flight control computer in the helicopter do the role of transmitting sensor information to the ground computer and getting control commands from the ground computer and applying them to the helicopter using servo motors. So a simple 8-bit microprocessor can be used instead of heavy and high cost computing system. Using the experiment system, we obtained a dynamic model for a small-scale helicopter and designed a controller for hovering flight.