Semi-Active Control for a Helicopter with Multiple Landing Gears Equipped with Magnetorheological Dampers

Due to their extensive use in various applications, helicopters need to be able to land in a variety of conditions. Typically, a helicopter landing gear system with skids or passive wheel-dampers is designed based on only one critical touchdown condition. Thus, this helicopter landing gear system may not perform well in different landing conditions. A landing gear system with magnetorheological (MR) dampers would be a promising candidate to solve this problem. However, a semi-active controller must be designed to determine the electrical current applied to the MR damper to directly manage the damping force. This paper presents a new skyhook controller, called the skyhook extended controller, for a helicopter with multiple landing gears equipped with MR dampers to reduce the helicopter’s acceleration at the center of gravity in off-normal landing attitude conditions. A 9-DOF simulation model of a helicopter with multiple MR landing gears was built using RECURDYN. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed controller, co-simulations were executed with RECURDYN and MATLAB in different initial pitch and roll angles at touchdown. The main simulation results show that the proposed controller can greatly decrease the peak and rms acceleration of the helicopter’s center of gravity compared to a traditional skyhook controller and passive damper.