For decades, academic and industry researchers have been working on
control algorithms for autonomous helicopters — robotic helicopters that
pilot themselves, rather than requiring remote human guidance. Dozens
of research teams have competed in a series of autonomous-helicopter
challenges posed by the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems
International (AUVSI); progress has been so rapid that the last two
challenges have involved indoor navigation without the use of GPS.

But
MIT's Robust Robotics Group — which fielded the team that won the last
AUVSI contest — has set itself an even tougher challenge: developing
autonomous-control algorithms for the indoor flight of GPS-denied
airplanes. At the 2011 International Conference on Robotics and
Automation (ICRA), a team of researchers from the group described an
algorithm for calculating a plane's trajectory; in 2012, at the same
conference, they presented an algorithm for determining its "state" —
its location, physical orientation, velocity and acceleration. Now, the
MIT researchers have completed a series of flight tests in which an
autonomous robotic plane running their state-estimation algorithm
successfully threaded its way among pillars in the parking garage under
MIT's Stata Center.

Read more: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/autonomous-robotic-plane-flies-indoors-081...

Video: Melanie Gonick, MIT News

Additional
footage courtesy of: Adam Bry, Nicholas Roy, Abraham Bachrach of the
Robust Robotics Group, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory, Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Massachusetts
Institute of Technology.

Special thanks to the Office of Naval
Research under MURI N00014-09-1-1052 and the Army Research Office under
the Micro Autonomous System Technologies program.