The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents to represent helicopter pilots inside closed-loop simulations has been a significant focus of collaborative research activities between DSTO’s Air Operations Division (AOD) and the University of South Australia. CHOPPA (Combined Helicopter OPerations and Performance Analysis) is a MATLAB/Simulink based simulation framework developed by AOD which su...

Considering Unmanned Autonomous Vehicles (UAVs) the planning tasks mainly consist of finding paths between given waypoints with respect to given constraints. In this paper we developed a path planning system for flying UAVs (VTOLs and CTOLs) built upon Hexagonal grids which also supports simple dynamics (handling with speed). The planning system is additionally supported by a trajectory smoothi...

This paper considers the problem of generating optimal guidance trajectories for high-speed waypoint transitions by an autonomous helicopter. Given a set of waypoints and a desired order for passing through them, an optimal control problem is solved using collocation for every pair of consecutive waypoints. The linear hover model of the Yamaha R-50 helicopter is employed in the optimal control ...

We present a dynamics model of rotor blades for real-time helicopter simulation. Collisions between the air flow and the moving blades make helicopters fly. In aerodynamics, or even in computer simulations, they precisely analyzed the collisions between the fluid(air) and the solid object(blades), and calculated the differential equations from the collisions. Thus, it was hard for them to gener...

This article presents an extended case study in the application of neuroevolution to generalized simulated helicopter hovering, an important challenge problem for reinforcement learning. While neuroevolution is well suited to coping with the domain's complex transition dynamics and high-dimensional state and action spaces, the need to explore efficiently and learn on-line poses unusual challeng...

Helicopter Safety Study 3 (HSS-3) is a Norwegian joint industry research project established in 2008. The main objectives of the study are to assess the risk level associated with offshore helicopter transportation, propose indicators to monitor safety, and identify safety measures for further improvement. The study will address risk through two complementary approaches: one using risk influenc...

Most research on fuzzy regulators has focused on integrating rules in intelligent control systems. In this paper a fuzzy helicopter regulator for a single-rotor helicopter PZL Kania is considered. Unlike other methods that match only the ability of stable flying, our methods match hovering conditions with disturbances. Two simulations were performed to validate our method. In the first simulati...

This paper presents a rapid software prototyping environment, based on Matlab/Simulink, for realtime simulation and control of a mini-helicopter robot. The application of the environment is illustrated with a software-in-the-loop simulation example. The environment is integrated by own modules (mini-helicopter simulation model, navigation filter, multirate control, filters) and modules based on...

This article presents novel results obtained using variance constrained controllers and maneuvering helicopters when also some helicopter sensors fail. For this purpose complex, control oriented, physics based helicopter models are used. A nonlinear model of the helicopter, which includes blade flexibility, is first linearized around specific maneuvering flight conditions (i.e. level banked tur...