Little Bird UAV Makes First Autonomous Full-Sized Helicopter Flight Ever
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Thursday, 15 of July , 2010 at 12:29 am
In 2008, we covered the Army’s unmanned Little Bird project, which took an off the shelf MH-6 helicopter and shoved a bunch of computers in the back to make it optionally manned, and even controllable from an Apache attack helicopter.
Until now, the Little Bird depended on a set of GPS waypoints for guidance. But last month, the UAV (developed by an Army-funded team from Carnegie Mellon and the Piasecki Aircraft Corporation) completed a course which involved taking off, avoiding obstacles during flight, locating a safe landing zone, and then landing, entirely autonomously. Separate tests challenged the UAV by setting flight paths through obstacles or designating a landing zone on top of a car, but the Little Bird was able to use its sensors to dynamically alter its flight plan to account for all the unexpected and potentially crashy stuff. According to Danger Room, this was the very first time a full-sized helicopter made a completely autonomous flight.
It turns out that a lot of the technology used for the autonomous capabilities of the Little Bird was derived from Carnegie Mellon’s DARPA Urban Challenge vehicle, Boss. For example, a LIDAR scanner was mounted on the helicopter to create 3D maps of its surroundings to detect and avoid obstacles, which is a feature common to most autonomous vehicles. The video below shows such a system mounted on a small autonomous helicopter successfully avoiding obstacles including a 6mm wire with a 2% reflectivity at 90 meters, at a 2007 DARPA demonstration:
Now that Fire Scout has been canceled, the Unmanned Little Bird has the potential to fill that niche. And as much as I hate to say it (because I really liked Fire Scout), a full sized autonomous helicopter does offer a number of distinct advantages: for example, it can not only carry more payload, but it can also transport several people, none of whom necessarily needs to be a pilot. Also, since this is a modification of an existing platform, it’s probably going to be cheaper to build and cheaper to fix. Not nearly as cool as Fire Scout, maybe, but perhaps a better idea overall.
[ Little Bird UAV ] VIA [ Danger Room ]
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Category: Military
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