UAV Survivability Enhancement via Agile Maneuvering in Dynamic Environments

The overall goal of the program is to demonstrate optic flow for aggressive, obstacle-avoiding flight, and to develop a vehicle that incorporates the necessary flight capabilities, guidance and control, and hardware for swallow-like flight and landing. The NTC/MIT autonomous helicopter (AHMMH-1) will act as a demonstrator vehicle for demonstration of static and dynamic obstacle avoidance. Combined reactive (insect-like) avoidance behaviors will be combined with dynamic planning based on receding horizon Mixed Integer-Linear Programming (MILP) and other dynamic planning architectures within the robust maneuver automaton (RMA) structure that is already supported by the AHMMH-1. The RMA approach provides a natural way to accommodate external events (sudden appearance of unknown obstacles, flying too close to known obstacles due to estimation errors, completely reactive navigation through cluttered spaces), and as such forms the baseline architecture for our planned developments.