Model predictive control for autonomous helicopters with computational delay

This paper describes a model predictive control (MPC) based control framework for a small-scale helicopter. The framework has two levels of control comprising a high-level MPC and a low-level linear feedback controller. The MPC tackles the helicopter's nonlinearity and solves the tracking problem, whereas the linear feedback controller responds to fast dynamics of the helicopter and compensates the low bandwidth of the high-level MPC. The MPC strategy works in a piecewise constant fashion with the computational delay taken into account to enhance the control performance. With this configuration, it is possible to implement computational intensive control algorithms on systems with fast dynamics such as helicopters. The overall control framework was tested through flight simulations and experiments, and very satisfactory performance has been demonstrated.