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Cited by 535

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An Application of Reinforcement Learning to Aerobatic Helicopter Flight

Abbeel, Pieter, Coates, Adam, Quigley, Morgan, Ng, Andrew Y.·2007·Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 19

Abstract

Autonomous helicopter flight is widely regarded to be a highly challenging control problem. This paper presents the first successful autonomous completion on a real RC helicopter of the following four aerobatic maneuvers: forward flip and sideways roll at low speed, tail-in funnel, and nose-in funnel. Our experimental results significantly extend the state of the art in autonomous helicopter flight. We used the following approach: First we had a pilot fly the helicopter to help us find a helicopter dynamics model and a reward (cost) function. Then we used a reinforcement learning (optimal control) algorithm to find a controller that is optimized for the resulting model and reward function. More specifically, we used differential dynamic programming (DDP), an extension of the linear quadratic regulator (LQR). 1

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Metadata

Authors
Abbeel, P., Coates, A., Quigley, M., & Ng, A. Y.
Venue
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 19
Publisher
The MIT Press
Published
2007-09-07
Pages
1-8
OpenAlex
W2169209873
Cited by
535
References
0
FWCI
29.87
Type
book chapter
Language
en
Open access
closed

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: An Application of Reinforcement Learning to Aerobatic Helicopter Flight. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.7551/mitpress/7503.003.0006
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Abbeel, P., Coates, A., Quigley, M., & Ng, A. Y. (2007). An Application of Reinforcement Learning to Aerobatic Helicopter Flight. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 19. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/7503.003.0006

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.