Flight Control for Unmanned Rotorcraft
Sergey Nazarov, Flight control engineer, Steadicopter Ltd

The rapid development of UAS in the past three decades makes it possible to use them in various human activity fields. The growing demands on applications stimulate the further development of UAS technologies, especially regarding civil tasks for which flight safety is the main objective. The wind and the atmospheric turbulence impose restrictions on unmanned rotorcraft operations. The magnitude, frequency content, and dimensions of atmospheric flow are expected to affect the rotary UA dynamics, control performances, and flight safety. The ICAO roadmap requires from UAS the same level of safety and the same standard airworthiness type certification of manufacturing design as is now required of conventional manned aircraft. More than a hundred years of aviation experience cannot be avoided to achieve such standards, but the development methods used in piloted aviation also cannot be adopted directly. Using MATLAB software and MATLAB-based tools, such as CIFER and CONDUIT, helps solve the problem of qualitative control design.