Stanford’s Autonomous Helicopters Teach Themselves To Fly
Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008
A three man team of computer scientists at Stanford University have created helicopter that can fly themselves. The helicopters learn maneuvers by watching other helicopters.
A remote control pilot flies another helicopter while orientation, direction, velocity and acceleration are measured. A ground based computer crunches the data and talks to the Stanford helicopter via radio 20 times per second. On a larger helicopter, all of the equipment would be on board.
The Stanford helicopter is able to repeat the maneuvers completely on its own and in some cases, improving upon what the remote control pilot did.
The helicopters sports accelerometers, gyroscopes and magnetometers to help get the job done.
Possible applications for the helicopters are things like helping firefighters map out hot spots in wild fires in real time or searching for land mines in war zones.
See the helicopter in action here.
Link to a better video here, with comments by Stanford team.
See another Stanford helicopter project here.
Update: See the new Stanford Helicopter website with more videos here and the helicopter mapping research website here.
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