Fuzzy control of an unmanned helicopter

This paper discusses an application of fuzzy control to an unmanned helicopter. The authors design a fuzzy controller to achieve semi-autonomous flight of a helicopter by giving macroscopic flight commands from the ground. The fuzzy controller proposed in this study consists of two layers: the upper layer for navigation supervising the lower layer and the lower layer for ordinary rule based control. The performance of the fuzzy controller is evaluated in experiments where an industrial helicopter Yamaha R-50 is used. At present an operator can wirelessly control the helicopter through a flight computer with eight commands such as 'hover', 'fly forward', 'turn left', 'stop', etc.