Flight trajectory control of an eight-rotor UAV for enhanced situational awareness

This paper focuses on a critical component of the situational awareness (SA), the control of autonomous vertical flight for an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). With the SA strategy, we proposed a two stage flight control procedure using two autonomous control subsystems to address the dynamics variation and performance requirement difference in initial and final stages of flight trajectory for a nontrivial nonlinear eight-rotor helicopter model. This control strategy for chosen helicopter model has been verified by simulation of hovering maneuvers using software package Simulink and demonstrated good performance for fast stabilization of engines in hovering, consequently, fast SA with economy in energy of batteries can be asserted during search-and-rescue operations.