CS229 Final project Control of an autonomous helicopter in autorotation

Autonomous helicopters have been studied for years because they represent an interesting class of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Recent works (abb [1]) have successfully shown that unmanned helicopters can accomplish the most di cult acrobatic gures and can be controlled in di cult attitudes by learning from a human model. In the wake of these studies, the present work is interested in handling an unusual con guration such as landing with the engine disabled (i.e. in autorotation). The ultimate goal that we xed to ourselves is to build a controller that would handle the approach and the landing at a given point without the engine at any time. In the course of this class project, we built upon the previous works made by the Stanford AI/Robotics Lab. By customizing the remote-controlled helicopter used for #Pieter, we were able to perform successfull autorotations without the nal landing, and we laid out the ground for future works on the landing itself.