Experimental Results on Closed Loop Helicopter Model Identification

This paper presents the experimental results of a bare-aircraft model identification of a small-medium sized helicopter. The experimental data were collected using two different approaches, i.e. with manual inputs in open-loop and with automatic inputs in closed-loop. This work demonstrates experimentally that, using a suitable algorithm, the two different experimental approaches converge on equivalent models. The proposed algorithm, i.e., a continuous-time variant of the Predictor Based Subspace Identification Algorithm (PBSID) algorithm, prove to deal properly with data acquired in closed-loop where the correlation between the inputs is very high.