In this paper, an efficient approach to design and optimize a flight controller of a small-scale unmanned helicopter is proposed. Given the identified helicopter model, the Linear Quadratic Gaussian/Loop Transfer Recovery (LQG/LTR) robust control method is applied for trajectory tracking and attitude control of the helicopter with a two-loop hierarchical control architecture. Since the performance of the controller extremely depends on its weighting matrices, the Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm is introduced to automatically select the parameters of the matrices. Comparative studies between optimal algorithms are also carried out. A series of flight experiments and simulations are conducted to investigate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed optimised controller.

In this study, a dual-wideband monopole antenna has been designed and developed for the universal mobile telecommunications system (UMTS), wireless local area network (WLAN), and worldwide interoperability for microwave access (WiMAX) applications. A novel approach integrating artificial bee colony (ABC) with the HyperLynx® 3D electromagnetic platform based on the method of moments has been employed to calculate the design parameters of the monopole antenna performance for the respective target frequencies and return loss. The proposed dual-wideband antenna operates in the dual-frequency ranges of 1.69–3.99 and 4.75–6.22 GHz applicable for the UMTS, WLAN, and WiMAX applications and it is fabricated on the flame resistant-4 substrate plate of 42 × 51 × 1.6 mm3. The performance of the presented monopole antenna is analyzed in terms of gain, radiation pattern, and s-parameter. The input reflection coefficient (S11) parameter and radiation pattern of the antenna are verified through the measurements. The measured values of the antenna parameters are found to match well within tolerable limits with the simulation results. The results illustrate that the presented dual-wideband monopole antenna obtained by using the ABC algorithm exhibits better performance in point of operating bands and s-parameter as compared with the multi-band antennas previously published in the literature.

This paper proposes a novel and simple expression for effective radius of annular-ring microstrip antennas (ARMAs) obtained using a recently emerged optimization algorithm of artificial bee colony (ABC) in calculating the resonant frequency at dominant mode (TM11). A total of 80 ARMAs having different parameters related to antenna dimensions and dielectric constants was simulated in terms of the resonant frequency with the help of an electromagnetic simulation software called IE3D™ based on method of moment. The effective radius expression was constructed and the unknown coefficients belonging to the expression were then optimally determined with the use of ABC algorithm. The proposed expression was verified through comparisons with the methods of resonant frequency calculation reported elsewhere. Also, it was further validated on an ARMA fabricated in this study. The superiority of the presented approach over the other methods proposed in the literature is that it does not need any sophisticated computations while achieving the most accurate results in the resonant frequency calculation of ARMAs.