Autonomous Aircraft Perform Practical Aerobatics
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Monday, 26 of November , 2007 at 6:23 am
One of the most annoying things about airplanes and helicopters is their dependence on a suitable place to land. Of course, helicopters are much more versatile than airplanes are, but they still need a large, reliably flat and stable surface. Landing any sort of aircraft on a boat, much less a moving truck, is dangerous under the best of circumstances and usually impossible most of the rest of the time. It’s becoming clear how much precision autopilots are capable of, and researchers at Georgia Tech and MIT are taking advantage of robots’ skill at flying to perform acrobatics designed to make drone launch and recovery much more versatile.
This video shows a small, autonomous helicopter developed by Georgia Tech landing on slopes ranging from 45 up to 60 degrees. Although the surface that the helicopter lands on is velcro, it’s possible to have the helicopter reverse the pitch of its rotors on landing, which would push it down onto the landing pad. Notice how the helicopter is able to recover from a missed landing in the middle of the video. Skills like this, combined with adaptive sensors, would allow a drone to land virtually anywhere, even on a non-level moving surface.
Both an airplane propeller and a helicopter rotor operate on the same principle: air moving rapidly over a spinning, curved surface generates thrust. It turns out that if you’ve got a small enough plane and a big enough engine (i.e. a drone), you can actually make a helicopter out of an airplane, using the propeller as a rotor. It’s tricky and requires a lot of fine manipulation of the wing and tail control surfaces, but autopilots excel at fine manipulation, and MIT has been able to create an autopilot program to transition an airplane from vertical takeoff, to horizontal flight, to a vertical landing:
The US Air Force actually messed around with a concept sort of like this back in the 50s. Although it was jet powered, the X-13 also took off and landed from a suspension rack. It’s worth noting that it was nearly impossible for the human pilot to accomplish this maneuver.
VIA [ New Scientist ]
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Category: Artificial Intelligence, Military, Research
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