Autonomous helicopter for surveillance and security

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles represent today an advanced and complex robotics platform for novel tasks. For example, UAVs can be used in applications for traffic monitoring and surveillance, emergency services assistance, photogrammetry and surveying. Generally, an UAV must be fully autonomous; autonomy is accomplished by a complex interconnection of systems related to a wide range of topics, e.g., flight low level control, navigation and task-based planning, elaboration of sensor signals, software architecture for reactive behaviours, communication. Today the challenge is the ability to insert UAVs in a cooperative network based on autonomous agents as UAV, UGV (Unmanned Ground Vehicle) to accomplish a specific task a priori defined. In this paper we introduce a prototype of autonomous aerial vehicle, the Helibot helicopter, specifically designed for applications as surveillance and security.