Guidance, navigation and control of an unmanned helicopter for automatic cargo transportation

This paper presents an intelligent and robust guidance, navigation and control solution for a rotorcraft UAV to perform automatic cargo transportation between two moving platforms. Different from the conventional GPS/INS based navigation, the proposed UAV system also integrates a scanning laser range finder to robustly correct its altitude measurement and an advanced vision sub-system to detect the cargo loading and unloading positions. The whole system has been verified in the 2nd AVIC Cup - International UAV Innovation Grand Prix. The joint team of National University of Singapore and Nanjing University of Science and Technology have won the first place in the final round of the rotary-wing category competition.