This paper presents our solution for enabling a quadrotor helicopter, equipped with a laser rangefinder sensor, to autonomously explore and map unstructured and unknown indoor environments. While these capabilities are already commodities on ground vehicles, air vehicles seeking the same performance face unique challenges. In this paper, we describe the difficulties in achieving fully autonomou...

The robustness of autonomous robotic systems to unanticipated circumstances is typically insufficient for use in the field. The many skills of a human user often fill this gap in robotic capability. To incorporate the human into the system, a useful interaction between man and machine must exist. This interaction should enable useful communication to be exchanged in a natural way between human ...

A study of the combined helicopter noise and vibration problem was conducted. A refined aerodynamic model capable of calculating the unsteady surface pressure distribution on rotor blade/flap combinations is developed and coupled with an aeroelastic analysis simulation code. An acoustic prediction tool based on WOPWOP is combined with the aeroelastic analysis based on a flexible blade with coup...

In this paper an embedded vision system and control module is introduced that is capable of controlling an unmanned four-rotor helicopter and processing live video for various law enforcement, security, military, and civilian applications. The vision system is implemented on a newly designed compact FPGA board (Helios). The Helios board contains a Xilinx Virtex-4 FPGA chip and memory making it ...

The effectiveness of surrogate modeling of helicopter vibrations, and the use of the surrogates for optimization of helicopter vibration are studied. The accuracies of kriging, radial basis function interpolation, and polynomial regression surrogates are compared. In addition, the surrogates for the vibratory hub shears and moments are used to generate an objective function which is employed in...

In this study, attitude control is proposed for helicopters with actuator dynamics. For the nominal helicopter dynamics, model-based control is firstly presented to keep the desired helicopter attitude. To handle the model uncertainty and the external disturbance, radial basis function neural networks are adopted in the attitude control design. Using neural network approximation and the backste...

To mitigate the effects of a corrosive operating environment, the Coast Guard has planned an extensive preventative maintenance program for its Sikorsky HH60J helicopters based on helicopter flight time. We construct a mixed integer linear program that schedules the weeks during which each helicopter undergoes maintenance, as well as the weeks during which a helicopter conducts operations eithe...

In this paper, a novel direct self-repairing controller via quantum information technique and nonlinear fault observer is designed, which addresses tracking control and convergence rate problem of a helicopter. First, a nonlinear fault observer is designed to diagnose the helicopter’s fault. Next, in order to improve the convergence rate and stabilization of the helicopter system, an exponentia...

Airflow hazards such as vortices or low level wind shear have been identified as a primary contributing factor in many helicopter accidents. US Navy ships generate airwakes over their decks, creating potentially hazardous conditions for shipboard rotorcraft launch and recovery. Recent sensor developments may enable the delivery of airwake data to the cockpit, where visualizing the hazard data m...

In this paper, a computational fluid dynamics simulation method is developed to study the influence of rotor overlapping azimuth on aerodynamic performance compound coaxial helicopter. The verified by comparing numerical results with wind tunnel experiment data NASA rotor. Two azimuths upper and lower blades are considered, isolated helicopter in hover forward analyzed respectively. State 1 mea...