You are standing in a dense urban environment, surrounded by nefarious-looking power lines, trees, and buildings. You hear a whine and the rhythmic beating of helicopter blades. Suddenly a flying beast rounds the corner at 25 mph, not more than 20 feet off the ground. It suddenly swerves to miss the black power lines it hadn't seen earlier because of the buildings. Slowing down, it hovers overhead as it looks around for a more clear path, then as quickly as it came, zips down the street and rounds another corner.


Some crazy Army combat pilot? Nope, that was a robotized 12 foot unmanned Yamaha RMax, and it was flying without any human intervention-- with no maps, sensing its environment and navigating to safely reach its destination. The humans simply "click and forget." They needn't worry if the destination they choose is fraught with obstacles or is even unobtainable inside a building. The robot helicopter is smart enough to take care of the details.


This scenario is not a pitch or a dream. It is reality. Backed by Honeywell, our team, lead by Sanjiv Singh, developed a complete obstacle avoidance system capable of avoiding even telephone wires at speeds over 25mph. "Sure," you say, "anyone can do that at least a few times." In what we believe to be an aviation first, we demonstrated this system in over 1000 successful obstacle avoidance runs over several months of testing.


We were very successful with this project because once we had built our system, we were able to test 12 hours a day in an isolated environment for over 4 months. Our partners provided everything we needed to continue working effectively and quickly, with no interruptions. This was a dream job for a year.

Initially I was responsible for the systems-level design and integration. Once we got to field ops, I ran the daily testing-- coordinating with the entire team at the end of each day as we designed our tests for the following day. During testing, I coordinated between our pilot and the rest of the team to make sure the daily flights went smoothly and safely. I specialized in the flight dynamics identification for our simulations. Occasionally, I did data analysis and helped with the algorithm design. Very occasionally, I would help with the actual code (mostly for low-level control systems). Sebastian was our crack coder, and would usually be done implementing a software routine before the rest of us were done arguing about how it should be done!