Abstract
Autonomous vehicles have been in development for several years as they can find use in a wide variety of missions such as surveillance, rescue, terrain mapping, etc. Currently, a research on development of an autonomous mini helicopter is under progress at Department of Aerospace Engineering, IIT Kanpur, India. This research project is mainly focused on developing various sensors and communication units, actuators and integrating them onboard a mini helicopter and interfacing them with ground station which has the developed control logic algorithm to provide autonomous control and navigation capability. The objective of this paper is to give the complete system architecture comprising of ground station, wireless systems for communication and onboard electronics. This paper also explains the RPM control logic algorithm deployed at the ground station unit. The results of autonomous flight of mini helicopter with the developed systems are also discussed in this paper.