Control design of a UH-60 rotorcraft via CLTR and direct optimization

High-performance rotorcraft controller design is characterized by the need to compensate for both the longitudinal and lateral dynamics simultaneously. Rather than leaving these modes largely decoupled, one often needs for performance consideration to incorporate direct mode decoupling as a part of the controller design, especially when the system model includes high-frequency dynamics from the rotor and lag states. In addition to the usual design considerations of stability augmentation, a high-performance rotorcraft such as the UH-60 would also require a good command bandwidth and decoupling in the heave, yaw, pitch and roll command responses. In this paper, the method of closed-loop transfer recovery (CLTR) and direct optimization are applied to the control design of a UH-60 rotorcraft.