Research and implementation of visual helicopter coning angle measurement system

A visual helicopter coning angle measurement method is presented in this paper. First, a reflective target is pasted onto the helicopter rotor tip; second, a high-speed industrial camera and LED strobe light are used to obtain grayscale images of each blade's reflective target when the rotor is rotating; Third, target grayscale images are processed using the Otsu threshold segmentation algorithm to obtain binarized images. Next, the eigenvalues of the images are obtained using Sobel operator edge detection method, so the height difference of the reflective target and the helicopter coning angle can be calculated. A prototype measurement system is designed to prove the feasibility and scientific validity of the method. Experimental results show that the system is easy to operate, and the measurement accuracy is approximately 0.5 mm. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.