In this study, we design an autonomous navigation, guidance and control system for a small electric helicopter. Only small, light-weight, and inaccurate sensors can be used for the control of small helicopters because of the payload limitation. To overcome the problem of inaccurate sensors, a composite navigation system is designed. The designed navigation system enables us to precisely obtain the position and velocity of the helicopter. A guidance and control system is designed for stabilizing the helicopter at an arbitrary point in three-dimensional space. In particular, a novel and simple guidance system is designed using the combination of optimal control theory and quaternion kinematics. The designs of the study are validated experimentally, and the experimental results verify the efficiency of our navigation, guidance and control system for a small electric helicopter.

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In this study, we aim to achieve an autonomous locomotion of the mobile robot in the unknown indoor environment. In particular, we propose a novel landmark construction and detection method. The landmark is generated by combined image and shape features. In the landmark detection step, we represent the new matching with confidences defined automatically. The effectiveness of the proposed landmark is verified by experiment. Moreover, we introduce the novel landmark based graph SLAM. In our method, that landmark detection is performed on each node. Then, if the robot find the landmark it found once, local loop closure is generated and optimization is performed. The advantage of this method is that we can perform graph optimization before find loop-closure. The effectiveness of this proposal graph SLAM is verified by simulation and experiment.

In this paper, we propose the intermeshing quadrotor helicopter which has feature of the tandem rotor helicopter and the intermeshing helicopter. Kinematic and aerodynamic characteristics of this helicopter have not yet been well known because such a helicopter does not exist so far. Therefore, we aim at conducting motion analysis of the helicopter. First, equation of motion of the helicopter is derived using multi-body dynamics. Next, we construct the system which enables that the helicopter fly manually. Finally, flight experiment was carried out to collect flight data needed for parameter identification of the model.