Attitude and Flapping Angles Estimation for a Small-Scale Flybarless Helicopter Using a Kalman Filter

Unmanned aerial helicopters are essential for use in environments that are inaccessible for fixed wing aerial vehicles. Flybarless helicopters are famous for their high agility and maneuverability, which makes them suitable platforms in many challenging applications. This paper is concerned with the problem of estimating the attitude and flapping angles of a flybarless, small-scale, single-rotor helicopter. This paper utilizes a nonlinear model for the Maxi Joker 3 helicopter. A dynamic-model-based Kalman filter is designed and implemented to estimate both the attitude and the flapping angles of the helicopter. Results of a simulation scenario are shown to validate the performance of the proposed approach. The results demonstrate high-accuracy flapping angles estimation with errors not exceeding, |Amax|,0.3° in longitudinal flapping angles and 0.1° in lateral flapping angles. An experimental test is also conducted to demonstrate the performance of the method.