Flying Robots: Experiments in Complex System Control

Major reference:

Saripalli, S., Montgomery, J.F., and Sukhatme, G.S. (2003):
Visually-guided Landing of an Autonomous Aerial Vehicle, IEEE Transactions
on Robotics and Automation (accepted, to appear June 2003)

http://robotics.usc.edu/~srik/papers/landing2002.pdf

Other references:

Garcia-Pardo,P.J., Sukhatme, G.S., Montgomery, J.F. (2001) " Towards
Vision-Based Safe Landing for an Autonomous Helicopter", Robotics and
Autonomous Systems, 38(1), pp. 19-29

http://robotics.usc.edu/~gaurav/Papers/pedro.pdf

Three questions: (pick one and answer it in a one-page essay and submit it before 

May 5th at noon, to Sheng Shi, SAL349, which is a pigeon hole in the computer science mailroom. )

Please be sure to include your 2-digit class ID # on your essay.

1. What is control ? Why do we need it ?
2. What is difficult about controlling aerial rotorcraft ?
3. What are the limitations of decoupled linear control ?