Scalable Architecture for CPS: A Case Study of Small Autonomous Helicopter

Building a scalable and highly integrated systems is an important research direction and one of key technologies in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). Autonomous helicopter is a typical CPS application and its flight presents challenges in flight control system design with scalability. In this paper, we present the integration architecture of hardware and software for the flight control system based TREX 600 helicopter. In order to enhance scalability, the flight control system uses the PC104 and the ARM which is exerted to process the measurement data, including the position, attitude, height etc. The flight control is developed based multi-loop decoupling PI control which is easy to be implemented. Finally, the flight control system is successfully verified in the actual autonomous flight control experiment

The ServoHeli-20 Rotorcraft UAV Project

This paper describes recent research on the design, implement and testing of a small-scaled rotorcraft Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (RUAV) system - ServoHeli-20. A turbine-powered UAV weighted less than 10kg was designed, and its major components tested by a group of undergraduate students at Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shenyang, China. The aircraft was designed to reach a top speed of more than 20mps and fly a distance of more than 10 kilometers and then is going to be used as a testbed for experimentally evaluating advanced control methodologies dedicated on improving the maneuverability, reliability as well as autonomy of RUAV. Sensors and controller are implemented onboard. The full system has been tested successfully in the autonomous mode using the multi-channel decoupling PID controller. The results show that the rotorcraft UAV can follow the trajectory which assigned by the ground control station exactly in the real windy environment