Toward autonomous rotorcraft flight in degraded visual environments: experiments and lessons learned

Stambler, Adam; Spiker, Spencer; Bergerman, Marcel; Singh, Sanjiv

doi:10.1117/12.2223474

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…Our system focuses solely on the generation of safe trajectories made feasible for full sized rotor-craft, as part of the fully autonomous tactical autonomous aerial logistics (TALOS) system (Paduano et al, 2015) with perception handled in Stambler, Spiker, Bergerman, and Singh (2016).…”

Section: Unmanned Rotorcraftsmentioning

confidence: 99%

High performance and safe flight of full‐scale helicopters from takeoff to landing with an ensemble of planners

Choudhury

Dugar

Maeta

et al. 2019

Journal of Field Robotics

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Autonomous flight of unmanned full‐size rotor‐craft has the potential to enable many new applications. However, the dynamics of these aircraft, prevailing wind conditions, the need to operate over a variety of speeds and stringent safety requirements make it difficult to generate safe plans for these systems. Prior work has shown results for only parts of the problem. Here we present the first comprehensive approach to planning safe trajectories for autonomous helicopters from takeoff to landing. Our approach is based on two key insights. First, we compose an approximate solution by cascading various modules that can efficiently solve different relaxations of the planning problem. Our framework invokes a long‐term route optimizer, which feeds a receding‐horizon planner which in turn feeds a high‐fidelity safety executive. Secondly, to deal with the diverse planning scenarios that may arise, we hedge our bets with an ensemble of planners. We use a data‐driven approach that maps a planning context to a diverse list of planning algorithms that maximize the likelihood of success. Our approach was extensively evaluated in simulation and in real‐world flight tests on three different helicopter systems for duration of more than 109 autonomous hours and 590 pilot‐in‐the‐loop hours. We provide an in‐depth analysis and discuss the various tradeoffs of decoupling the problem, using approximations and leveraging statistical techniques. We summarize the insights with the hope that it generalizes to other platforms and applications.

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Section: Unmanned Rotorcraftsmentioning

confidence: 99%

High performance and safe flight of full‐scale helicopters from takeoff to landing with an ensemble of planners

Choudhury

Dugar

Maeta

et al. 2019

Journal of Field Robotics

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“…To get a better penetration through brownout, some systems are based on infrared lidar. However, they are only operational for mild degraded visibility [5] because of the strong scattering of infrared through brownout. Radar DVE, which works between Ku and subterahertz (subTHz) bands, suffers less from scattering because the wavelength is larger than the particle sizes.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modeling of an active terahertz imaging system in brownout conditions

Prophete¹,

Pierrat²,

Sik³

et al. 2018

Appl. Opt.

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We present a theoretical evaluation of a subterahertz (subTHz) system to image through a scattering medium composed of scatterers of sizes close to the wavelength. We specifically study the case of sand grain clouds created by helicopter rotor airflow during landing in arid areas. The different powers received by one pixel of a matrix made of subTHz sensors are identified. Photometric and antenna-based sensors are considered. Besides the thermal contribution to the noise, we focus our attention on the radiation backscattered by the brownout. It appears that a configuration where the source and the camera are distant is the most promising configuration and is realistic for embedded systems.

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Toward autonomous rotorcraft flight in degraded visual environments: experiments and lessons learned

Cited by 2 publications

References 2 publications

High performance and safe flight of full‐scale helicopters from takeoff to landing with an ensemble of planners

High performance and safe flight of full‐scale helicopters from takeoff to landing with an ensemble of planners

Modeling of an active terahertz imaging system in brownout conditions

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