Human-powered helicopter

Over the last few years, the University of Maryland has designed and built a human-powered helicopter to win the Sikorsky prize - hover in a box 10m square for one minute, and hit an altitude of 3m sometime within that minute.

Using knowledge grafted from my thesis, I created an implicitly coupled flight dynamic model of our quad-rotor configuration in MATLAB. Using a rigid-blade approximation and a 3-state Pitt-Peters dynamic inflow with an in-house ground effect correction for each rotor, the simulation tool is a reduced comprehensive analysis code featuring:

1. Trim : find the blade pitch settings and power required to hover at a given height

2. Stability : extract linearized dynamic models to identify unstable modes/divergence

3. Climb maneuver : simulate the Sikorsky prize maneuver. Starting from trim, the pilot pedals faster to increase RPM to gain altitude, and reduces speed back to the "trim" value from step 1.

The climb/descend maneuver shows good agreement with experiments. This simulation was also used as the objective function in an optimization process to obtain the "best" RPM profile to minimize total energy.