Detection And Avoidance Of Obstacles By Helicopters

Report discusses problems relevant to control subsystems enabling helicopters on nap-of-the-Earth flight paths to detect and avoid obstacles automatically. Indicates similarities between this and obstacle-avoidance problem of industrial mobile robots. Two approaches extend two-dimensional obstacle-avoidance concept to three dimensions. First involves direct search of three-dimensional range-map data for indications of openings between obstacles. Second involves compression of data into two-dimensional map for path search.