Reliable robust PID controller design for TRMS

Station keeping, or hovering in spite of uncertainties like sensor or actuator failures, is important for a variety of applications like load delivery and air-sea rescue. During rescue operations helicopter will be in hazardous surroundings often which may lead to sensor or actuator failure. These failures may take helicopter to instability. Rescue operation should not be affected along with the assurance of stability of helicopter even under sensor or actuator failure. Since it is a manned air vehicle due to sensor, actuator failures during its operation, human life should not be at risk. Hence control algorithm should be reliable. This has motivated the present work to build a reliable robust PID controller to tolerate the system sensor, actuator failures. The experimentation is carried on TRMS because it has similar dynamic characteristics as that of helicopter system though some simplifications are made and TRMS has been proven to be a good benchmark problem to test and explore flight control methodologies. Design of reliable robust PID controller is done using MATLAB which is interfaced with TRMS setup. The simulation and real time implementation results are presented.