Hierarchical path planning and flight control of small autonomous helicopters using MPC techniques

Autonomous control of unmanned helicopters has drawn a great deal of interests in recent years. This paper investigates two aspects on this topic, namely the flight control and local path planning. The former is designed only using the low-level helicopter dynamics, but the latter take into account the high-level kinematics in an optimisation based framework. A guidance compensator is therefore developed to integrate them in an interacting way. The overall control principle is demonstrated in an indoor flight environment with promising results.