Tak-Kuen John Koo, Graduate Student
Yi Ma, Graduate Student
Kirill Mostov, Graduate Student
Benedict Tse, Other
Hyunchul Shim, Graduate Student
(Professor S. Shankar Sastry)
Funding Sources:
MURI-Integrated Approach to Intelligent Systems
The goal of this project is to develop an autonomous aerial robot as a testbed of An Integrated Approach to Intelligent Systems - MURI. The robot would be capable to fly autonomous, recognize and locate target object, and perform navigation. A model helicopter is used as the airframe of the robot, which has various flight modes such as hovering, forward/backward flight, sideward flight, vertical climb/descent, etc. This gives helicopter with an unparallel maneuverability to achieve the task. To develop a suitable control scheme for autonomous flying, a simulation program of the helicopter will be developed. The helicopter dynamics will be simulated based on the models developed in [1] and [2].
Computer vision system for the aerial robot is under development to perform object recgnition and navigation. We are also exploring the possibilities in combining control with vision directly for visual servoing and path planning. For control, in order to obtain informations about position, orientation, velocities and accelerations in both angular and translational directions, a Kalman filter will be employed for sensor fusion with the outputs of inertial sensors and GPS. In the future, this project would become the testbed for Multi-Agent Systems and Intelligence Augmentation of Human Centered Systems.