Lab 4, Pole placement control of helicopter model

Time and place

  • HVL Robotics Lab, Øyrane 12, 6800 Førde, 2. floor (under Reodorklubben).
  • Time: TBD.

Warning

  • Don’t put your fingers in the propellers. Don’t!
  • Make sure the helicopter has room to move around

Equipment

  • Helicopter model from Quanser with two propellers in “helicopter” configuration (not “duo copter”)
  • Lab PC, specific for the helicopter. This has Matlab, Simulink, all necessary licenses and other software.
  • The folder “Lab 4 RegTek” on the lab pc desktop.

Description

In this lab you will do PID and Pole Placement (PP) control on a helicopter model. Let`s decouple!

Your controller will be given a score, less is better. Take a screen dump of your score and controller gains (PID or PP), send it to me, and receive a thumbs up for completing the lab.

The helicopter model can be a fun, practical challenge for three reasons

  1. Yaw and pitch are coupled
  2. The trigonometric functions in the system model shows its non-linearity
  3. It’s like a helicopter, but it doesn’t fly away

The overall workflow for you to do is

  1. Turn on stuff
  2. Open Matlab, run a init script, then a Simulink model. Get familiar.
  3. Tune the PID manually
  4. Tune some PP gains/poles
  5. Get a score
  6. Win

Steps

  1. Open the desktop folder Lab 4 Reg Tek.
  2. Open Oppgave_1_pid.m (Matlab R2015b should open)
    1. Run it
  3. Open Oppgave_1_pid_simulink.slx
    1. Hit the Build button, blue dotted top right in simulink
    2. Wait for build to finish
    3. Find the Connect button, close to the play button, click it.
    4. Press play
    5. Helicopter should do some motions for 55 seconds and you get a score
    6. Click Connect button again to disconnect if not already disconnected
  4. Change your gains in the .m file and repeat the steps above (run, build, connect, play) until you`re happy

If all is well, repeat for Oppgave_2_polplassering.m and Oppgave_2_polplassering_simulink.slx, else:

  1. Disconnect power to the helicopter
  2. Restart PC
  3. Reconnect power to the helicopter

P.S: There`s no user restrictions on the lab pc so it`s surely possible to f*** things up for everyone. Please don`t use the lab pc for anything else than lab 4 and specifically - only change your gains/poles in the assigned .m files.

Reg tek rulez!