A helicopter with adaptive rotor blades for collective control

In this paper, we discuss the development of a helicopter rotor system which employs an adaptive rotor blade. The aspect of this rotor system which is new and unique is the replacement of the traditional swash-plate-based collective control with adaptive rotor blades which generate lift by using shape-memory-alloy-based active camber control. The initial work produced a fixed magnitude chamber change in an on/off fashion. Additional work has been done to develop a control scheme which allows a smooth variation of camber changes.