🚀 go-pugleaf

CMU's The Robotics Institute has had research and development
work sponsored by Boeing to provide visual servoing capability
for unmanned air vehicles to allow them to land unassisted
on carrier desks.

The visual servoing uses a camera to extract deck patterns to provide
input to the chopper controller at higher distance and
then use point laser ranging devices as the landing nears to calculate
distance and orientation wrt the deck.

We do not have one of the ummanned machines but have constructed
a tower with a controlled hoist that allows 80 feet of drop of a platform onto a
pitching and rolling deck below. The work has been successful and may continue
depending on sponsor.

This work has become important because we see strong parallels between
development of unmanned ground vehicle and umanned air vehicles. 

Additionally, there is work using a modified RC helicopter
to provide computer controlled flying. An indoor stand constrains
testing to approxiamtely 1m hemisphere and also provides accurate
position feedback. Good success with modeling has enabled
some nice hovering behavior even under external disturbances
including poking at it with a stick and putting large ventilation
fans nearby!

Tony Stentz and Omead Amidi, respectively are the people doing this work.


							nivek



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aka: Kevin Dowling			Carnegie Mellon University
tel: (412) 268-8830			The Robotics Institute
adr: nivek@rover.ri.cmu.edu		Pittsburgh, PA 15213