Development of 3D Vision Enabled Small-scale Autonomous Helicopter

This paper presents the development of vision based autonomous helicopter at Chiba University. The platform is designed to enable autonomous flight of a small-scale helicopter in unstructured environment. 3D vision system is chosen for the perception and measurement purpose. The whole system is designed with the consideration of payload, hardware availability, and software performance. The hardware is built with COTS (commercially off the shelf) products. The core control software is built on RTLinux for its real time performance. Based on the developed platform, we have studied the application of vision system for landing control. The experimental results are shown in the paper