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Flying Robots

UNSW COMPUTING student Sunny Leung has the best Honours project ever: he gets to play with a flying robot. He's teaching it to follow people.

"Making the AirRobot follow an object just seemed to be the logical thing to do," says academic high-flyer Sunny Leung, an Honours student in computer science.

Sunny's project is to teach a four-bladed helicopter to follow a ground object as it moves along. The helicopter's name is the AirRobot, and it's an advanced piece of helicopter technology. "The AirRobot is capable of very stable flight right out of the box. It can hold itself steady in a fixed position without any user input even in slight wind," says Sunny. "If it's hovered in GPS lock mode and is pushed out of the way by something, it can move back to where it was!"

It's part of a long-standing project at UNSW using helicopters and the AirRobot to develop artificial intelligence (AI). Sunny's project takes advantage of the AirRobot's unique balancing skills to develop a more complex AI.

"In the real world, it would be extremely helpful even if the robot isn't acting autonomously. You can see inside the 3rd floor of a burning building to check if anyone is inside for example, or be given an aerial view of a disaster zone. Hopefully the automation that my project gives the robot will make it more usable in these kind of situations."

Sunny's research can be taken to the RoboCup Rescue competition. Sunny says, "It's a long long way from following a thief in a getaway car through city streets, but hopefully it can be used in smaller scale applications like RoboCup Rescue."