Systematization of flight instruction and control for autonomous helicopter

A radio-controlled (RC) helicopter can be used in the fields of aerial crop dusting, aerial photography, and many more. However, controlling a RC helicopter needs advanced techniques. Therefore, a flight instruction system that provides guidance on how to fly a RC helicopter is required. Examples that give flight instructions to an autonomous helicopter have been reported, but those had been designed and developed individually. To extend the application of an autonomous helicopter to an indoor environment, such as a factory, the systematization and standardization of flight instructions are required. From this, each flight instruction generative system that has been prepared for individual use can generate common flight instructions. Likewise, an autonomous helicopter can operate based on the common flight instructions designed for various purposes. In this paper, we have defined flight instruction codes based on the Numerical Control (NC) code system that has been used for a machine tool. In addition, we have systematized instruction codes. To verify such a system, an autonomous flight control system has been developed for indoor use and a flight experiment has been performed. As a result, we were able to confirm that the helicopter flew by executing the flight instructions that have been read.