Survey of advances in guidance, navigation, and control of unmanned rotorcraft systems

Abstract Recently, there has been growing interest in developing unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) with advanced onboard autonomous capabilities. This paper describes the current state of the art in autonomous rotorcraft UAS (RUAS) and provides a detailed literature review of the last two decades of active research on RUAS. Three functional technology areas are identified as the core components of an autonomous RUAS. Guidance, navigation, and control (GNC) have received much attention from the research community, and have dominated the UAS literature from the nineties until now. This paper first presents the main research groups involved in the development of GNC systems for RUAS. Then it describes the…