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Recently over the skies east of San Jose, California a Black Hawk helicopter was flying low and slow – and while pilots were aboard the aircraft, all flight manoeuvres were conducted autonomously.
In a November 5, 2012 flight over the Diablo Range, the U.S. Army Aviation and Missile Research, Development and Engineering Center successfully demonstrated low-level autonomous behaviors critical to the next generation of military rotorcraft: obstacle field navigation and safe landing area determination. Terrain sensing, statistical processing, risk assessment, threat avoidance, trajectory generation, and autonomous flight control were performed in real‐time during the two‐hour test flight.
Source: YouTube