Overview

The goal of this project is to push the state-of-the-art in autonomous helicopter flight, helicopter navigation, ground mapping, and air-to-ground cooperation of autonmous robotic vehicles.

Notice: We now have a new home page for the Stanford Autonomous Helicopter Project, specifically focused on autonomous helicopter control. This page only contains mapping-related research.

Experiments and Results

• Main Results and Animations page on helicopter ground mapping
• Change Detection, initial experiments

Historical Results

• Results from an autonomous multi-robot experiment at the NASA DART site
• Recent results on helicopter mapping and air ground cooperation (Sept 24, 2003)
• Results of mapping Gates Hall from the air, and other interesting surfaces (May 2003)
• Some very early results in ground mapping(Feb 10, 2003)

Papers

• Scan Alignment and 3-D Surface Modeling with a Helicopter Platform by Sebastian Thrun, Mark Diel, and Dirk Haehnel. (This paper won the best paper award at the 2003 International Conference of Field and Service Robotics.)
• Autonomous Helicopter Flight via Reinforcement Learning by Andrew Y. Ng, H. Jin Kim, Michael I. Jordan, Shankar Sastry

Sponsors

DARPA's MARS program