AFV-II: Robotic Aerial Platform for Autonomous Robot Research

An overview of an autonomous helicopter test-bed project at the Autonomous Robots Lab of the University of Southern California is presented. The core of this test-bed is a new autonomous helicopter, the Autonomous Flying Vehicle-II (AFV-II). The AFV-II is an evolution of the original AFV vehicle described in Lewis et al., (1993). The major features of the new vehicle system are: An on-board reduced complexity vision (RCV) system, a lightweight indoor test stand, a refined ‘behavioral control’ strategy and the use of active vision for target tracking. The device was built as a test-bed for examining issues in autonomous robot research. These areas include neural network learning, autonomous robot theory, active vision, and sensor research. A number of these research areas are brought together in the design of an autonomous aerial vehicle configured to compete in the 1994 International Aerial Robotics Competition.