The USC Autonomous Flying Vehicle ( AFV ) Project : Year 2000

Robot helicopter research at the University of Southern California began in 1991 with the formation of the Autonomous Flying Vehicle (AFV) Project and continues to the present day. During this time our lab has designed, built and conducted research with three robot helicopters. A brief project history and background is given, followed by a more detailed description of the current state and accomplishments of the project. We conclude with a discussion of future research plans. In 1991, our research in robotic helicopters began with creation of the project namesake, the AFV (Autonomous Flying Vehicle) 1]. We transitioned to our second robot, the AVATAR (Autonomous Vehicle Aerial Tracking And Retrieval), in 1994 and to our current robot, the second generation AVATAR (Autonomous Vehicle Aerial Tracking And Reconnassaince), in 1997. The \R" in AVATAR has changed to reeect a change in robot capabilities. Since the beginning of the project, a guiding design philosophy has been to create robots with high levels of autonomy. For example, to increase autonomy we require minimal robot dependence upon external resources. Therefore, we locate system power, sensors and computers onboard the robots themselves. Choices made for each are driven by factors such as weight, power consumption and cost. These choices consequently aaect the robot control system design. We use a behavior-based control approach for all three robots. In this approach, the control problem is partitioned into a set of loosely coupled computing modules. Each module, or behavior, is responsible for achieving a speciic task. These behaviors interact to achieve 1