Sikorsky Aircraft and the US Army have completed development and test of a UH-60M helicopter equipped with a modern Fly-By-Wire (FBW) Flight Control system. This paper describes the hardware architecture including the use of high availability processing elements for full-authority flight critical vehicle control. The software architecture that uses a partitioned operating system, and was utilized to facilitate safety and reduce software cycle time, will be described. Control Law (CLAW) strategy using model following techniques with auto-mode logic was employed to further reduce pilot workload and will be discussed in the paper. A model based development process was used throughout the entire program for software and control law design and test. To accomplish this, Sikorsky Aircraft developed a simulation environment and modeling tools that, together with the U.S. Army Aeroflightdynamics Directorate (AFDD)-developed CONDUIT® [1] flight control analysis and optimization tool, were integral parts of the process. The use of the flight control system integration lab (FCSIL) for pilot-in-the-loop and automated testing was extensively used to reduce risk and speed up development. Early CLAW prototyping on Rotorcraft Aircrew Systems Concepts Airborne Laboratory (RASCAL) [2] was used to ensure success on the first flight. The value of the approach taken will be discussed in this paper. More than four hundred hours have been flown by the two aircraft prototypes. The culmination of these activities led to achievement of Level 1 Handling Qualities in Good and Degraded Visual Environments (GVE/DVE). Flight test results and lessons learned are documented in this paper.
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