RC Helicopter Control

[imad151]

Hey, hope you’re all doing well.

I’m new to helicopters and helicopter simulation. I have a couple of questions about JSBSim and its applicability to RC or small scale helicopters:

Does JSBSim already include any RC-helicopter models? In other words, are there existing helicopter models (RC or otherwise) bundled with or contributed to the simulator?

Assuming there are one or more helicopter models available: is it possible to obtain realtime sensor data from the simulation (acceleration, angular rates, orientation, rotor states)? Would it be feasible to use that data as input for a custom control algorithm like RL or other custom implementations?

If possible, could you link me to a discussion or thread related to this?

[seanmcleod70]

Does JSBSim already include any RC-helicopter models?

I'm pretty sure the JSBSim repo doesn't, but you may find some elsewhere on the internet. In general there are a lot fewer helicopter models compared to fixed wing. The JSBSim repo does have one helicopter model, although it's not an RC scale model.

See - https://github.com/JSBSim-Team/jsbsim/tree/master/aircraft/ah1s

is it possible to obtain realtime sensor data from the simulation (acceleration, angular rates, orientation, rotor states)?

Yes, you can obtain pretty much all that data and also use it to feed into RL implementations etc.

There have been a number of people using JSBSim with RL, although I'm guessing 99% are using fixed wing models.