For decades, academic and industry researchers have been working on control algorithms for autonomous helicopters — robotic helicopters that pilot themselves, rather than requiring remote human guidance. Dozens of research teams have competed in a series of autonomous-helicopter challenges posed by the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI); progress has been so rapid that the last two challenges have involved indoor navigation without the use of GPS.
But MIT’s Robust Robotics Group — which fielded the team that won the last AUVSI contest — has set itself an even tougher challenge: developing autonomous-control algorithms for the indoor flight of GPS-denied airplanes. At the 2011 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), a team of researchers from the group described an algorithm for calculating a plane’s trajectory; in 2012, at the same conference, they presented an algorithm for determining its “state” — its location, physical orientation, velocity and acceleration. Now, the MIT researchers have completed a series of flight tests in which an autonomous robotic plane running their state-estimation algorithm successfully threaded its way among pillars in the parking garage under MIT’s Stata Center.
Read more: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/autonomous-robotic-plane-flies-indoors-0810.html
Video: Melanie Gonick, MIT News
Additional footage courtesy of: Adam Bry, Nicholas Roy, Abraham Bachrach of the Robust Robotics Group, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Special thanks to the Office of Naval Research under MURI N00014-09-1-1052 and the Army Research Office under the Micro Autonomous System Technologies program.
Duration : 0:2:48
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