The interest in small-scale UAVs has been steadily increasing for the last ten years. The ability to operate in dangerous environments and reduced system and operation costs are two main reasons for that. Small-scale autonomous helicopters attract attention due to their vertical take off, landing and hovering capabilities. This paper presents a challenging application: the transportation of a load by means of cooperation of multiple autonomous helicopters. For the first time the load transportation with three coupled helicopters could be demonstrated. Furthermore, the paper presents a fully distributed cooperative perception method based on the application of the Information Filter to integrate measurements from different sensors, e.g. cameras on-board helicopters, cameras on ground and a wireless sensor network and its experimental validation by tracking of a fireman. The above skills are integrated into the decision making and planning architecture of the AWARE platform. The application of the proposed methods in a multi-UAV mission involving the autonomous deploying of sensor nodes is also presented including experimental results. On-going work will be concentrated on increasing on-board intelligence for dealing with unforeseeable events from environment. The new functionalities integrated into AWARE platform will be demonstrated in May 2009 in Utrera, near Seville (Spain).
Cooperative autonomous helicopters for load transportation and environment perception
2009
12 Seiten, 6 Bilder, 16 Quellen
Conference paper
English
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