Experiments with small helicopter automated landings at unusual attitudes

This paper describes a set of experiments involving small helicopters landing automatically at high pitch angles. By leveraging the increased agility of small air vehicles, we show that it is possible to automatically land a small helicopter on surfaces pitched at angles up to 60 degrees. Such maneuvers require considerable agility from the vehicle and its avionics system, and they pose significant technical and safety challenges. Our work builds upon previous activities in human-inspired, high-agility flight for small rotorcraft. However, it was not possible to leverage manual flight test data to extract landing maneuvers due to stringent attitude and position control requirements. Availability of low-cost, local navigation systems requiring no on-board instrumentation has proven particularly important for these experiments to be successful.