Autonomous robotic plane flies indoors (video)

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.

The reason that we switched from the helicopter to the fixed-wing vehicle is that the fixed-wing vehicle is a more complicated and interesting problem, but also that it has a much longer flight time,” says Nick Roy, an associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics and head of the Robust Robotics Group. “The helicopter is working very hard just to keep itself in the air, and we wanted to be able to fly longer distances for longer periods of time.” With the plane, the problem is more complicated because “it’s going much faster, and it can’t do arbitrary motions,” Roy says. “They can’t go sideways, they can’t hover, they have a stall speed.

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Especially notice the garage-flight. Impressive.



This is not anything new in specific and I have seen allot "cooler" drones, but I still think it is a nice project.

Great so now this will lead to them being able to send drones out with out humans controlling them.

Give them a target, and they can go find it on their own, means less man power to implement drone surveillance in the future.

reply to post by benrl


Yep, everything will be totally self sufficient. I guess they will do just like the robot vacuum cleaners and automatically go back to base for a recharge when energy levels are low.
A drone somewhat like this equipped with a small powerful laser(similar to the one on Curiosity) could easily stealth-glide into a village and take out several targets before anyone can locate it and respond.
Quite horrible.

reply to post by LiberalSceptic


I would hope it would be some time before they allow it to pull the trigger with out human interaction, but I could easily see it used for target acquisition for airstrikes, etc.


Just imagine swarms of areal drones, quad copters and the like, all satellite linked together and sharing data, send them into an area they could find every warm body any where.

Something like that

reply to post by benrl


Yep like that, but even worse when in the air.