Originally published March 9 2005
Georgia Tech creates unmanned helicopter that can react to danger and learn from mistakes
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
The GTMax, a helicopter created by Georgia Tech and funded by DARPA, has shown the ability to react to danger situations and learn how to fly properly as situations change. Besides being able to fly around obstacles, the helicopter is able to react to control problems, and fly with no guidance system other than its own camera.
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are one step closer to someday matching --- and possibly surpassing --- their human-piloted counterparts, thanks to the completion of a project successfully tested by Georgia Tech and sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory.
Researchers from several partner institutions and organizations have helped to successfully build, test and fly the first rotary wing UAV, a helicopter called GTMax, with capabilities of flight control fault identification and reconfiguration, adaptive control and agile maneuvering --- all operating on a single vehicle and under a single software architecture.
Collaborators on the project include Draper Laboratories, Vanderbilt University, Scientific Systems Company Inc., Oregon Graduate Institute, Honeywell Laboratories and Boeing.
The flight represents the completion of a DARPA/Air Force project to develop an innovative new software-enabled control (SEC) system with applications to UAVs.
Advances in rotary wing UAVs are particularly important because of their requirement to take off and land in difficult terrain and restricted-size areas, such as ship decks, and their ability to hover while they identify and inspect specific locations.
Georgia Tech's primary contribution to the overall project was continuing work started by Boeing on the new SEC system, an Open Control Platform (OCP), which gives the UAV the ability to reconfigure its software systems autonomously in flight.
During the final test at Fort Benning, Ga., the GTMax used eight different low-level flight control systems and three guidance systems in a single flight, including adapting to primary flight control system hardware failures, environmental factors and changes in aircraft configuration.
The final experiment, recently conducted at the Military Operations Urban Terrain site in Fort Benning represents five years of collaboration between Georgia Tech's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering.
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