Autonomous robotic plane flies indoors at MIT

For decades, academic and industry researchers have been working on control algorithms for autonomous helicopters — robotic helicopters that pilot themselves, rather than requiring remote human guidance. Dozens of research teams have competed in a series of autonomous-helicopter challenges posed by the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI); progress has been so rapid that the last two challenges have involved indoor navigation without the use of GPS.

But MIT's Robust Robotics Group — which fielded the team that won the last AUVSI contest — has set itself an even tougher challenge: developing autonomous-control algorithms for the indoor flight of GPS-denied airplanes. At the 2011 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), a team of researchers from the group described an algorithm for calculating a plane's trajectory; in 2012, at the same conference, they presented an algorithm for determining its "state" — its location, physical orientation, velocity and acceleration. Now, the MIT researchers have completed a series of flight tests in which an autonomous robotic plane running their state-estimation algorithm successfully threaded its way among pillars in the parking garage under MIT's Stata Center.

Read more: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/au...

Video: Melanie Gonick, MIT News

Additional footage courtesy of: Adam Bry, Nicholas Roy, Abraham Bachrach of the Robust Robotics Group, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Special thanks to the Office of Naval Research under MURI N00014-09-1-1052 and the Army Research Office under the Micro Autonomous System Technologies program.

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[HappyFamilyPlan]

So this is how the use the gym at MIT...

[geneticallyinferior1]

i have mastered traveling forward in time at a nearly steady rate.

[Ryukachoo]

i've been meaning to look at ROS, didn't realize they had features that varied already. that's only half the story though, the other half is the state estimation using that simplified aerodynamics model. although that might be possible using a rudimentary physics engine for games

[Fotis Dimeas]

Marrying LIDAR, accelerometers and gyroscopes is already implemented on ROS. Look for laser_scan_matcher

[CHRIS TAYLOR]

9/11

[Ryukachoo]

you bet. bootstrap like crazy.

what he said in the video was an extremely high level description of something much more finicky, mostly the state estimation. marrying the LIDAR with accelerometers and gyroscopes sounds like a huge pain, however a system like this would be a huge boon to something like APM, the arduino pilot open source project

[Ravi M. Fernando]

You mean you want to cut and paste the code and see if you can be on par with MIT engineers.. The guy pretty much told you how to do in the video.

[HawkTigerBravo]

Holy shit. Robots FTW.

[inscover]

help less fortunate learn robotics check out inscover.org

[Amol Khade]

With complete due respect, I didn't found its such a gr8 at all... Its not so complex algorithm as well, me too belongs to AI(Artificial Intelligence) and NN(Neural Networking) field.. Expect lot more from MIT. :) Cheers !!!

[Jay Lozinski]

there was no traveling forward in time in terminator

[GoldPiles]

My Investment Trading System Works very similar to this.... but i designed my trading system a few years back..