Unmanned helicopters applied to humanitarian demining

This article covers research work about unmanned helicopters that is being developed by the Portuguese SME Introsys, S.A. in the context of a generic project targeting the development of a multi-robot system for landmine detection. As helicopters are complex multivariable nonlinear underactuated systems with strong coupling in some control loops, they are an interesting subject of research for the control and robotic research communities. Therefore, a wide range of techniques have been proposed in the literature to control such vehicles, ranging from classic control to soft-computing methods. The main goal for this article is to present a survey about existing low level control architectures for unmanned helicopters and to discuss which control design criteria (design requirements) are relevant when they are operating in the context of humanitarian demining