  This paper describes a set of experiments involving small helicopters landing
automated landing at unusual attitudes. By leveraging the increased agility of
small air vehicles, we show that it is possible to automatically land a small
helicopter on surfaces pitched at angles up to 60 degrees. Such maneuvers
require considerable agility from the vehicle and its avionics system, and they
pose significant technical and safety challenges. Our work builds upon previous
activities in human-inspired, high-agility flight for small rotorcraft.
However, it was not possible to leverage manual flight test data to extract
landing maneuvers due to stringent attitude and position control requirements.
Availability of low-cost, local navigation systems requiring no on-board
instrumentation has proven particularly important for these experiments to be
successful.
