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THE APPLICATION OF PARALLEL COMPUTING TO THE DESIGN OF ADVANCED HELICOPTER FLIGHT CONTROL SYSTEMS VIA REAL-TIME SIMULATION

T Lawes *

T Clarke *

P Taylor #

* Department of Electronics, University of Y o r k # Westland Helicopters Ltd

I "
Real-time, non-linear simulations of the dynamics of helicopter flight play a key role in the generation validation and testing of the flight control laws used in Automatic Flight Control Systems (AFCS), Tischler (1). The purpose of the AF'CS is to provide, through feedback, qualities of stability, disturbance rejection, decoupling of lateral and longitudinal motions, good pilot command tracking performance, but in a manner that generates a vehicle that is easy to fly, has low pilot workload in critical flight regimes and is consistent across the flight envelope. Open loop helicopter flight dynamics are nonlinear and highly cross-coupled, Bramwell ( 2 ) . This creates difficulties in designing for the qualities listed above. The established method of AFCS design involves well-tried, single input-single-output (SISO), loop-at-a-time techniques that are now seen to be inadequate for the next generation of high performance rotorcraft, Clark and LeTron(3). In essence, the requirement is for a highly agile, easier to fly and very safe platform. The control system will be implemented digitally and will involve a high degree of sensor, navigation system and controller integration (1). The safety aspects imply very high computational costs. Couple this with the necessity to use high data rate controllers to achieve the necessary performance, and one sees the need for a fresh approach to the problem. Modern, multi-input multi-output (MIMO) design methodologies, Manness et a1 ( 4 ) , are likely to provide the control solution. However, in order to test them adequately, it is important to use mathematical models that accurately represent the real system including high order dynamics, Menaker and Rosen (5). In the case of helicopters, high-order dynamics include those generated by the complex rotor system from which all the propulsive and control forces and moments are derived. To test complete systems, including hardware-in-theloop, it is necessary to use real-time simulation, Chen and Hindson (6). The purpose of the work described in this paper is to develop a model that is generic, includes high-order dynamics and runs in real time. Many serial computational methods have been shown (6) to be deficient in that oversimplifying assumptions have to be introduced to enable real-time operation. These eliminate some of the higher order dynamics considered significant (1). Since this model aims to provide a detailed study of their impact on flight control and handling, assumptions have to be minimised and all attempts made to remove computational artifacts from the simulation. This paper shows that a parallel modelling approach using transputers, INMOS ( 7 ) , is not

only capable of generating the required model, but is also ideally suited to its natural concurrency. The transputer, INMOS ( e ) , is a single VLSI device with processor, memory and communications links for direct connection to other transputers. Concurrent systems can be constructed from a collection of transputers operating concurrently and communicating through links. AFCS DESIGNS That helicopter flight control system design lags that for fixed wing aircraft by almost a decade ( 3 ) is well established. Digital controllers were, until quite recently, not normally used in helicopters. However, in the early- to mid-Eighties, the fixed-wing aircraft Industry was starting to develop sophisticated digital systems, so it should be possible to learn from their experience. Tischler (1) outlines several fixed-wing cases where post-design modifications were made in order to provide acceptable handling qualities. Some of the mistakes made were due to the design method not yielding information on the effects of, for example:Zero order hold dynamics Aliasing Intersample response Computational delays Hidden oscillations. Digital distortions were not fully understood, and were shown (1) to result from:Trapezoidal rule transformations Sensitivity to parameter variations Computer quantization and roundoff. Direct digital design accounts for the issues listed above, leading to more accurate system characterisation, Houpis and Lamont (9). Hence, the final design has a greater likelihood of success, eliminating many of the post-design modifications indigenous to existing methodologies. To investigate the issues, complex dynamic models, operating in real-time, are a vital element. They give a greater degree of confidence in both the methodology and the specific design (1). Post-design modifications and software reverification are costly to perform. They can lead to significant delays in the critical path of the aircraft development programme. Thus, in the case of rotorcraft, which already have a long development life, a greater understanding of modern direct digital design techniques is required in order to prevent these same costly errors and delays occurring. Having chosen a design technique, the quality of the final product relies on an accurate mathematical portrayal of the system, Ogata (10). When a controller is tested in real-time simulation, with a model that is simplified to achieve real-time operation, masked oscillations, intersample responses, aliasing

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and the effect of zero order hold dynamics on the system may not be evident until the first test flights, with potentially catastrophic results. There is obviously a need to use higher order, real-time simulations. By employing the processing power of parallel techniques (7) in real-time modelling of helicopter dynamics, the minimum of assumptions need be made.

dynamics, central to the Nevertheless, it has its simulation, gives a good performance matching and Blade Element approach.

role of the model. place in basic baseline for forms part of our

The helicopter may be considered as a number of discrete, yet interacting modules, some of which may be further sub-divided. Figure 1 shows a schematic representation This general structure of helicopter dynamics indicates a hierarchical modular form. The following discussion shows it to be ideal for a concurrent implementation. Using the general structure described above, each module is self contained, only using information that is strictly necessary to determine its dynamic behaviour. Our approach ensures that only the relevant internal calculations are performed and results passed to other appropriate modules. Developing the model in this manner permits each module to be equated with its physical interpretation in a natural way. Correct functionality of each module can be examined. This is important, as the final system is complex and is otherwise difficult to validate and interpret.

This method ( 2 ) considers the aerodynamic behaviour of rotor blades. Each blade is divided into a number of segments. Lift is calculated over each segment in parallel. As the blade is a rotating system, many different flow regimes occur along its length. The blade element approach is able to take these variations into account. It produces an accurate enough high order dynamic representation for o u r purposes. With the development and the increased capability of digital computers, very sophisticated models of helicopter rotors have been developed, Johnson (13,14,15) These schemes include the modelling of elastic deformation of blades and complicated unsteady aerodynamic effects, and detailed descriptions of the rotor wake. In comparing the results Of these sophisticated models with the relatively simple blade element/momentum theory approach, it is evident ( 5 ) that for the purposes required of this model, the blade element approach is perfectly adequate.

The rotor is the principle nodule within the helicopter model. It dominates the aircraft characteristics and is fundamental to the dynamic response, Stepniewski and Keys (11). The lifting and control forces are generated by it, and it strongly interacts with the airframe. The rotor itself may be further decomposed. Each .blade can be divided into blade segments. Thus, there is an hierarchy of parts, each closely related, yet decoupled, with its own distinct dynamic behaviour. Figure 2 shows this schematically. concurrent approach provides a powerful and highly appropriate modelling solution. Since the rotor dominates the model, the choice of modelling approach is crucial. Under-modelling causes key dynamic components to be missed. Over-modelling provides little useful extra information, but generates a large computational cost, impairing the real-time quality of the complete simulation.
A

For architectural reasons also, we consider that the blade element approach should be the basis for this simulation. The technique supports the hierarchical modular form described above. It is able to handle the decomposition of the rotor head down to individual blade segknents, and it provides the necessary detail for modelling the interactions of the rotor with the remaining helicopter elements.

There is strong interaction between the rotor and the remaining helicopter elements. In adopting a concurrent model, the physical interaction of the components may be taken into account via the model structure. Current serial real-time simulations often have difficulty in tackling this problem. The following are typical interactions. Resonances are usually set up due to interactions between the helicopter and its environment. During ground runs, the rotor's higher order dynamics can interact with the undercarriage, creating Ground Resonance ( 2 ) . This can cause severe damage. Another interaction occurs in flight, causing the body to oscillate in a "slow gyroscopic mode" ( 2 ) . Interaction, under low forward speed with a sideslip component, can generate a problematical flight condition, Lynn et a1 (16). The main rotor tip vortex may pass close to the tail rotor and induce relatively high velocities over it. Based on the direction of rotation of the tail rotor, this phenomenon results in increase or decrease of the tail rotor thrust. In certain cases where the thrust is decreased, pilots have reached the mechanical limits of the pedals whilst trying to compensate for it. Under quartering flight or transition manoeuvres, there are a number of complex wake interactions that can OCCUK as the helicopter moves from one flight regime to another. It is important to simulate these accurately in order to cover fully the problem domain (2,11,16) .

As

the rotor dominates the model, several approaches to high order dynamic simulation have been considered. Two rotor models have been actively pursued and code generated.They are based upon: i) ii) Momentum Theory Blade Element Theory

This method, ( 2 ) , (11) and Prouty (12), considers the rotor as a simple disc that imparts momentum to a mass of air flowing through it. It is a satisfactory approach when only considering performance of the helicopter; yielding a neat solution that is relatively easy to implement in real-time. However, it makes use of simplifying assumptions and ignores the higher order

As discussed above, helicopter dynamics lend

themselves easily to hierarchical modular form. Each module is intrinsically selfcontained, utilising information that explicitly relates to it, passing it only to those modules with which it dynamically interacts. If a module is able to be subdivided into elements, each of which can be regarded as a process, then the basic helicopter dynamic structure can be mapped almost directly onto an equivalent Occam structure INMOS (17,18). Thus the Occam structure very closely matches that of the dynamic model discussed above. Each process represents an element of the model and the Occam channels provide the means to control the movement and distribution of the information in order to achieve the desired dynamic response. The mechanism of the rotor model involves the calculation of a data set at each segment of each blade at a series of azimuth blade positions. Thus there is a natural multiplexing process occurring as each blade rotates through 360 degrees. The segmental information is integrated up as necessary at each blade station, and the forces and moments resolved to a common axis set. A strong parallelism exists using this approach. If the rotor module is spread over several transputers, communication becomes a major real-time issue. The Occam channels have a finite bandwidth, limiting the speed at which data may be passed. Thus there is an engineering trade off between volume data transfer and overall simulation efficiency. This is seen when considering the model of a single blade. The current blade model divides a main rotor blade into twenty sections. Each has its own unique blade parameter set: Angle of attack Relative Mach number Flap and lag angles,velocities and accelerations Induced velocity. Sending all of this information, for all the segments of all the blades, including the tail rotor, would require the passing of [20 x 9 x N1 data arrays, where N is the number of blades. This is repeated at each blade azimuth position. In this case,it results in bottlenecks, giving rise to a very inefficient simulation. By the careful choice of algorithms, a limited number of necessary inputs need be passed.Table 1 summarises these.

As only twelve values are passed,in place of the large arrays above, there is a significant reduction in size and time penalties. A suitable set of outputs from the blade module is: Current thrust from blade Blade moment and torsion Blade position relative to hinge, ie flap lag angles Induced velocity distribution for wake iteration.

All the information required by the hub model for resolution of moments and forces is now available. Extra information, such as flap h lag velocities and accelerations, is not required by the rest of the model and is retained for module use only. By passing Only essential information, on an inter-modular basis, communication overheads are minimised.

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The most computationally intense aspects of the model occur within the two rotor modules: main rotor and tail rotor. It is therefore instructive to isolated and examine their performance. Since they are essentially the same in operation, we shall only consider the main rotor. The current main rotor module consists of several sub-sections representing the blades and the hub. The present simulation has not been optimised for computational efficiency, yet it yields the times for a single azimuth position listed at Table 2 .
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a 1.11 ms
4.8

Single blade module Time for hub resolutions Complete rotor head

0.36 ms ms

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Current wind conditions Body angles and mot ions

Blade root pitch angle Current angular velocity at the hub Position relative to airframe

1 value 1 value 1 value 3 values

6 values

As a blade module holds large amounts of information internally about blade status, it is useful to allot each blade to one processor as shown in Figure 3. This is a variation of the standard farming topology ( 7 ) . Each blade process is fed with the same information from the farmer process via its own internal buffer. At first sight, bottlenecks may appear to be a problem. However, the processing time for each process is similar and much longer than the communication time. Thus if the bladel process is fed first, followed by blade2, blade3 and blade4 consecutively, a short delay in the start time of execution 'will occur. Hence bladel will terminate first, shortly followed by blade2, and so on. The internal buffer processes then clear their values and await the next value from down the line, eliminating the bottlenecks.'Once the hub process receives the blade values, it is able to perform the resolution of the forces and moments and pass them on to the rest of the system.
when distributed onto a four-processor farm, the observed computation time f o r the complete rotor model is 1.52 ms. This represents an increase of 316%, resulting in a simulation speed of 657 Hz. A four-times speed-up is not possible because of the extra external communications overheads and small bottlenecks occurring as the blade3 and blade4 processes terminate.

1-

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Earlier simulation work, based upon the Momentum Theory approach, has responded well to algorithm optimisation: many of the aerodynamic equations share like terms. Precalculation of these showed a marked increase in simulation speed: over 300%. Using the Blade Element approach, it is reasonable to assume that an increase of at least 100% can be achieved within the individual blade modules. Further improvements include enhancing the buffer processes on the worker processors such that pipelining of the internal hardware is exploited. The desired minimum goal is a simulation speed of 1260 HZ. This is derived from the aeromechanics of the helicopter. The main rotor turns with an angular frequency of about 3 . 5 Hz. Ideally, it is necessary to calculate the rotor responses for every one degree of blade azimuth rotation. This represents a 1260 Hz data rate. If the above optimisation results in a 100% speed up of simulation, then this figure will be exceeded.

misinterpret truncation and other machine dependent effects as being natural dynamic modes. Similarly, the fine grain of the model can show up effects not normally seen in conventional real-time models. An example is the natural imbalance of moments generated by each blade on the rotor head as the rotor sweeps through a single revolution. A non real-time simulation that has been itself validated against flight data forms another key element in the validation process. Also, flight data is also available to validate gross dynamics directly.
CONCLUSION

The next generation of advanced rotorcraft will require new design and testing tools. Real-time, high order dynamic simulation will form a key ingredient. A transputer-based, parallel approach to real-time modelling of helicopter dynamics is being developed in this study. A generic simulation of high dynamic order can be achieved.that is artifact-free, to the limits of current validation, and has the flexibility and growth potential necessary for future systems.
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The model structure with its interconnections is clearly shown in Figure 4. The Power Plant module takes the toraue consumed bv the main and tail rotors and modifies the shaft angular velocity to account for the engine and transmission response. The output of the Main Rotor module is used by the Wake and Fuselage Responses module to calculate the wake distribution and resDonses - - -.- - -.. . . . of the aircraft body. The wake is fed b k k into the Input Mixing module for the next iteration of the simulation. The Equations of Motion module takes in the main and tail rotor responses along with the fuselage responses and calculates the dynamic behaviour of the helicopter. The results are then fed back into the start of the system. The Input Mixing module collates all the information fed back and prepares it for appropriate distribution to the two rotor modules ready for the next iteration. The topology shown takes the processing times summarised at Table 2 :
T A E L E 3

This work has been funded through an SERC CASE Studentship in conjunction with Westland Helicopters Ltd

REFERENCES
1. Tischler M. B., 1987, "Digital Control of Highly Augmented Combat Rotorcraft", NASA Technical Memorandum 88346 (USAAVSCOM Technical Report 87-A-5
2.

Bramwell A. R. S., 1976, "Helicopter Dynamics", Edward Arnold.

3. Clark, R. N. and LeTron, X. J. Y., 1989, , AIAA J. G 12, No 2, pp. 201-208.
4. Manness M. A., Gribble J. J. and MurraySmith D. J., 1990, "Multivariable Methods For Helicopter Flight Control Law Design: A Review", Proc. 16th European Rotorcraft Forum, Glasgow

Maidtail rotor/power plant Eqs motion/wake & fuselage/ input mixing Total time

1.5 ms 0.4 ms

5. Menaker, D. and Rosen, A . , 1988, Vertica, J.2, pp 155-178. 6. Chen R. T. N. and Hindson W. S., 1985, "Analytical and Flight Investigation of the Influence of Rotor and Other High-Order Dynamics on Helicopter Flight Control System Bandwidth", Proc 1st Ann Forum Int Conf on Basic Rotorcraft Research, North Carolina.
7.

1.96 ms

"The Transputer Applications Notebook", INMOS Ltd 1989.

The timings at Table 3 represent a simulation speed of 510 Hz. Following the optimisations discussed earlier, the target of 1260 Hz should easily be attained. This current model is not an efficient configuration of transputers. There are two sequential blocks, each containing concurrent elements. Topologies are currently being addressed that further exploit the parallelism of the system.

8. "The Transputer Databook", INMOS Ltd 1989. 9. Houpis, C. H. and Lamont, G. B., 1985, "Digital Control Systems", McGraw-Hill International.
10. Ogata, K., 1990, "Modern Control Engineering" 2nd Edition, Prentice-Hall International. 11. Stepniewski, W. 2 . and Keys, C. N., 1984, "Rotary-wing Aerodynamics", Dover Publications, Inc., New York.

VALIDATION
Data from the model can be validated against several benchmarks. The correct magnitudes Of forces and moments occur. The elimination of computational artifacts is a major aspect of the current work. It is very easy to

12. Prouty R. W., 1990, "Helicopter Performance Stability, and Control", Robert E Krieger Publishing Company, Florida.

13.
14.

Johnson, W, 1981, Vertlca , Ipp 99-129 ' ,

Johnson, W., 1979, "A Comprehensive Analytical Model of Rotorcraft Aerodynamics and Aerodynamics. Part l", NASA TM-81182. 15. Johnson, W., 1979, "comprehensive Helicopter Analysis: A State of the Art Review", NASA TM-78575.

16. Lvnn, R. R., Robinson, F. D.. Batra. N N. and-Duhon, J..M., 1970;J. Arn.'kWkQmx %. U , p p 2-5. 17. INMOS Ltd, "Transputer Development System 2nd Edition", Prentice Hall, 1990. 18. INMOS Ltd, "Occam 2 Reference Manual", Prentice Ha11,1988.

Figure 1. The interacting modules of a helicopter.

Figure 2 Modular decomposition of a helicopter rotor system.

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Figure 3 The Main Rotor Processor Farm

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