The USC Autonomous Flying Vehicle Project was initiated in 1991. Since then, the Robotic Embedded Systems Laboratory has designed, built and conducted research with four robot helicopters, the most recent being the 3rd generation AVATAR (Autonomous Vehicle Aerial Tracking And Reconnaissance) shown above.

Since the beginning of the project, a guiding design philosophy has been to create flying robots with high levels of autonomy. Initially, the focus of our research was on creating a reliable controller for a model helicopter. Once that had been achieved, we focused on performing higher-level tasks with the helicopter. In addition to stable autonomous flight, we are now able to perform tasks such as GPS waypoint navigation, autonomous vision-based landing and autonomous sensor deployment. We are currently researching areas such as sensor deployment on a moving target, stealthy target pursuit, vision-based obstacle avoidance in 3D, terrain mapping and autonomous science data acquisition.

Last modified: May 24 2006