Mitigating the effect of background noise in sound based helicopter control

Our research focuses on the use of sound to enhance the control of an autonomous indoor helicopter - Flyper. One of the many challenging problems in this project is managing the uncertainty which is present in input data and the control actions; this paper focuses on managing the uncertainty in the input data. We present a fuzzy logic system which infers how much confidence should be placed on a control decision based on the data which was used to make that decision. The input data is a supervised and sound based position estimate of the flying robot. The output of the fuzzy inference system provides us with a confidence parameter used to attenuate the position control of the autonomous helicopter. We performed test flights with and without the fuzzy confidence parameter and with and without artificial disturbance in form of concurrent speech. We employed a motion tracker to capture the helicopter´s movement during all test flights. The analysis of the data collected shows encouraging results.