Development of an Unmanned Helicopter for Vertical Replenishment

This paper presents an intelligent and robust guidance, navigation and control solution for a rotary-wing UAV to carry out an autonomous cargo transportation mission between two moving platforms. Different from the conventional GPS/INS-only navigation scheme, this solution also integrates sophisticated Lidar and vision systems capable of precisely locating cargo loading and unloading positions. Besides, another complementary GPS/INS system is set up on the moving platforms with communication to the unmanned helicopter so that the controlled UAV is able to follow the dynamic platforms with good tracking performance. The whole system has been successfully implemented, and with its superb performance the Unmanned Systems Research Group from the National University of Singapore won the first place in the final round of the rotary-wing category competition of the 2nd AVIC Cup — International UAV Innovation Grand Prix 2013.