A real-time helicopter testbed for insect-inspired visual flight control

The paper describes an indoor helicopter testbed that allows implementing and testing of bio-inspired control algorithms developed from scientific studies on insects. The helicopter receives and is controlled by simulated sensory inputs (e.g. visual stimuli) generated in a virtual 3D environment, where the connection between the physical world and the virtual world is provided by a video camera tracking system. The virtual environment is specified by a 3D computer model and is relatively simple to modify compared to realistic scenes. This enables rapid examinations of whether a certain control law is robust under various environments, an important feature of insect behavior. As a first attempt, flight stabilization and yaw rate control near hover are demonstrated, utilizing biologically realistic visual stimuli as in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster.