Learning to Fly: Design and Construction of an Autonomous Airplane

Humans are, and for the foreseeable future will remain our best and only example of true intelligence. Therefore, a lot of work has been done in recent years to abstract com-putational models of human control strategy that are capa-ble of accurately emulating dynamic human control behavior. Land-based autonomous vehicles, both in simu-lation and on real roads, have, for example, made success-ful use of this modeling formalism. Very little work in the past has, however, attempted similar such skill transfer from humans to robots for aerial vehicles, such as helicop-ters or airplanes. Although control can be quite different from land-based vehicles, we contend that human pilots can potentially serve as excellent guides in the develop-ment of intelligent autonomous aerial vehicles. As a first step in modeling human control strategies in airplanes, we are developing and building a robotic airplane as an ex-perimental platform for studying human-to-robot skill transfer in aerial vehicles. This paper describes the design of this airplane, the status of the project and future planned experiments. 1