Fuzzy behavior navigation for an unmanned helicopter flying in an indoor environment

There are many aerial missions in hostile urban and indoor environments where human intervention is considered difficult or dangerous. Accomplishment of such missions require use of unmanned autonomous aerial vehicles (UAV). Unmanned air vehicles for such missions must be equipped with a fully autonomous navigation system. Many methods that have been proposed for navigation of autonomous systems either lack the necessary intelligence or are not responsive enough to cope with flying speeds of UAVs. This paper presents a new method for autonomous navigation of UAVs using reactive fuzzy behaviors. It extends the well known 2-D navigation system used in unmanned ground vehicles to 3-D navigation system suitable for UAVs. The reactive fuzzy behavior are multivalued in structure and the system uses some kind of voting to determine commands that satisfy all behaviors in the system. Simulation results carried out using MATLAB’s virtual reality toolbox have shown that the proposed system works very well and the UAV has been able to effectively avoid all static and pop-up obstacles at different flying speeds. Index Terms – Autonomous Helicopter, Fuzzy Behavior System, 3-D environment