ABSTRACT
ABSTRACT Unmanned helicopters have proved to be ideal platforms for various applications such as surveillance, aerial photography, and other military missions. Unmanned flybarless helicopters are known for their high agility and maneuverability, which makes them fit for many challenging missions. The problem of estimating attitude angles of a flybarless, smallscale, single-rotor helicopter is addressed in this chapter. A nonlinear model for the Maxi Joker 3 helicopter and a dynamic model-based Kalman filter are designed and implemented to estimate the attitude angles of the flybarless helicopter. High accuracy state estimation is obtained, with small errors in attitude and angular rate estimation. A near-hover flight test is also conducted to validate the performance of the proposed method.
