Development of Autonomous Autorotations for Traditional Helicopters

My primary goal is to develop autonomous autorotation capability for traditional helicopters running ArduPilot. The ability to autonomously detect a power failure and safely execute an autorotation will add a greater level of redundancy to the ArduCopter firmware. This will aid in making traditional helicopters safer to operate, reducing the risk of harm/damage to people, property, and the unmanned vehicle itself.
My secondary goal is to develop the functionality without loss of generality, maintaining its applicability to all helicopters. Contained within this proposal is a review of previous work done by others. Following this, preliminary investigations show that main rotor head momentum is a critical factor. A methodology is proposed to scale a generic velocity trajectory using the main rotor head momentum in hover. The trajectory will be empirically determined through SITL and real-life testing. The resulting flight mode will provide a robust approach to completing an autorotation manoeuvre for any helicopter. An overview plan of how development time will be allocated, over the GSoC period, is presented. Finally, a short section detailing my background follows.