flying time from the base to any particular location – all of Northern Ireland can be covered in just over 30 minutes. Beside the map, sits an air desk paramedic who listens to NIAS radio traffic and can pre-emptively activate the helicopter if calls such as major RTC, falls from a height or declared major incident are overheard. Otherwise, the team respond to requests from emergency services o...

Received Sep 9, 2013 Revised Feb 2, 2014 Accepted Feb 26, 2014 This paper describes the actual flight movements of electric helicopters and how to implement a disaster area monitoring system using electric ground vehicles and electric helicopters. A quad-rotor helicopter and a hex-rotor helicopter were used in the proposed system, specifically, the AR.Drone 2.0 and the DJI Innovations frame kit...

This paper presents the design and implementation of an algorithm for landing a helicopter autonomously on a moving target. The target is neutral; it is neither adversarial nor cooperative. A downward-looking camera is used to acquire and track the target. A template matching algorithm is used for acquiring the target in the images. This is integrated with a trajectory controller for landing th...

We describe further progress towards the development of a MAV (micro aerial vehicle) designed as an enabling tool to investigate aerial flocking. Our research focuses on the use of low cost off the shelf vehicles and sensors to enable fast prototyping and to reduce development costs. Details on the design of the embedded electronics and the modification of the chosen toy helicopter are presente...

The price barrier for the implementation of UAVs commercially is substantial, limiting growth in this area. This paper presents results from a project aimed at developing light-weight and low-cost systems for the on-board control of a small scale commercially available helicopter, targeted at the low-end of the market. This would allow UAVs to be used by relatively untrained operators. The cont...

This paper presents our solution for enabling a quadrotor helicopter, equipped with a laser rangefinder sensor, to autonomously explore and map unstructured and unknown indoor environments. While these capabilities are already commodities on ground vehicles, air vehicles seeking the same performance face unique challenges. In this paper, we describe the difficulties in achieving fully autonomou...

We present an overview of the autonomous helicopter project at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute. The goal of this project is to autonomously fly helicopters using computer vision closely integrated with other on-board sensors. We discuss a concrete example mission designed to demonstrate the viability of vision-based helicopter flight and specify the components necessary to accomplish this ...

COMPENSATION FOR A SMALL UNMANNED HELICOPTER Alexander Bogdanov , Eric Wan OGI School of Science and Engineering, OHSU 20000 NW Walker Rd, Beaverton, Oregon 97006 In this paper we report on the state-dependent Riccati equation (SDRE) control of a small unmanned helicopter for autonomous agile maneuvering. SDRE control requires reformulation of the vehicle dynamics into a pseudo-linear form. For...

Objective: To detect the presence of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and multi-resistant S. aureus (Multi-RSA) in emergency service helicopters. Methods: This proof-of-concept study used a convenience sample of two emergency service helicopters located in different Australian towns. Over a three-month period ending January 31 2015, within each helicopter five areas of perceiv...

Relative navigation of an aircraft (fixed wing or helicopter) close to ships at sea is a unique navigation problem. Shipboard helicopter operations provide a difficult operational environment. Wind over deck and wake turbulence shed by ship super structure offer challenging and unpredictable conditions during takeoff and landing. This is especially true in the operational environment that inclu...