Safe flying for an UAV helicopter

Today small autonomous helicopters offer a low budget platform for aerial applications such as surveillance (both military and civil), land management and earth sciences. In this paper we introduce a prototype of autonomous aerial vehicle, the Helibot helicopter, specifically designed for applications in cooperative networks. Fundamental steps in the design process of an UAV are shown. We also present work in progress in the field of failure detection and a novel idea to the problem of failure recovery using a terrain vision system. ©2007 IEEE.