Autonomous Helicopter Technology (Score 1)

I think some people have underestimated the state of the art in autonomous heli's today. The article mentioned CMU's autonomous helicopter. There are several other schools with experience in this area, such as MIT (Draper Lab), Stanford, Georgia Tech, etc. I work on the autonomous heli project (http://www-robotics.usc.edu/~avatar) at USC. I'll try to give a summary of capabilities that our current and past heli's have had. These heli's are of the small RC variety. Our current model weighs about 25 kg. It can fly autonomously at low speeds (under 5 m/s). It can do point to point navigation using GPS. It can follow a moving object on the ground, such as a human or ground robot. We've had take-off and landing capabilities on previous heli's and expect to demonstrate the same on this heli sometime in the next two weeks. We've done all this on processors no more powerful than a 486, and on small research grants. One thing that CMU's heli can do that ours can't is to follow an arbitrary quintic spline trajectory in space. There are still flight profiles that have yet to be demonstrated AFAIK. These include inverted and fast forward flight. The latter is difficult because the dynamics of the system change at high speed, and you need a lot of space, more than we have on our small urban campus. I'm just trying to make the point that a reasonable research effort by NASA, building on existing technology, can produce a very capable vehicle for exploring planetary bodies.