Mission Planning and Flight Control: Meeting the Challenge with Intelligent Techniques

Abstract

This paper presents a hybrid hardware/software platform that supports flight control and mission planning algorithms for an autonomous helicopter. The emphasis is on the use of intelligent fuzzy logic based techniques and an object-modeling approach to account for unmodeled dynamics to address uncertainty issues and to provide a flexible platform for development purposes and an operator interface. Fuzzy logic routines are implemented in such critical vehicle modules as the route planner the fuzzy navigator the fault-tolerant tools and the flight controller.