Obstacle-avoidance strategy for small scale unmanned helicopter

One of the important problems related to unmanned helicopter, is the obstacle-avoidance strategy in the urban environment. Inspired by many insects which use optic flow for various navigational tasks, in this paper, the optic flow bionics technology was applied to improve the autonomy of small unmanned helicopter. This strategy can maintain the helicopter flying in the middle of narrow corridors and avoid collisions with lateral obstacles. The controller can also decelerate and trigger an U-turn when the helicopter close to frontal obstacle. Eventually we verified the algorithm by simulating the real conditions and it turns out the strategy performs well.