Unmanned autonomous helicopter system design and its flight test

This paper describes an unmanned autonomous helicopter system developed by KAIST UAV team. The developed RUAV (Rotary-Wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) system consists of the guidance and control system for autonomous flight, ground control system (GCS), mission payloads, and communication system. The implemented autopilot in RUAV has four control channels for longitudinal and lateral velocities, altitude, and heading angle. A new guidance law was proposed for waypoint navigation and it was slightly modified and applied to various missions. The GCS is composed of three elements such as ground control computer, communication modem, and DGPS base station. The real-time flight data is downloaded to GCS via wireless RF link and stored in GCS. Also, the DGPS correction data, guidance and control commands, operation mode command, and controller gains of autopilot can be uploaded from GCS in real time. The developed RUAV is capable of autonomous take-off and landing and precise hovering. Finally, we demonstrated the performance of our RUAV system through flight test.