Yaw control of an unmanned aerial vehicle helicopter using linear active disturbance rejection control

In this article, a yaw channel controller with linear active disturbance rejection control is proposed for high-performance attitude tracking of an unmanned helicopter. In this control scheme, the linear extended state observer serves as a compensator, which can effectively reject parametric uncertainties and external disturbances. In this case, the attitude tracking controller is designed according to the input-output relation of yaw model. As a controlled plant, the yaw dynamical model is first obtained through the system identification method. Subsequently, in order to optimize the linear active disturbance rejection control applied to yaw control, an artificial bee colony algorithm is introduced to solve the problem of parameter tuning. Finally, comparative studies are carried out. The results from simulation and flight experiment show that the proposed controller provides better performances than the traditional controller.