Automatic Transition Hover of Helicopter Based on Explicit Model Tracking Control and Segmented Instruction Design

Automatic transition hover is a very important technology for helicopters, which can greatly reduce the control burden of pilots during reconnaissance, rescue, firefighting and other tasks. However, the poor stability of the helicopter and severe coupling between channels bring great difficulties to the implementation of automatic transition hover. This paper proposes a helicopter automatic transition hover method based on explicit model tracking. Firstly, to address the issues of poor stability of the helicopter and severe coupling between channels, an explicit model tracking control law is designed to achieve inner loop attitude stability. On this basis, speed and altitude control loops are designed using classical PID control law. Then, a segmented design method is adopted to separately design altitude and speed transition commands. Finally, the automatic transition hover designed in the paper is simulated and verified using Matlab/Simulink/Stateflow tools, and the results show that the designed helicopter automatic transition hover control law and instructions have good performance.