MIT's Acrobatic Helicopter

YourHero writes: "MIT has a new toy, a remotely-piloted helicopter that's agile, stable, and in the current public mood, perfect for urban combat and reconnaisance and surveying disaster sites. Oh, and it's also good for aerial photography. It's so good that it even does 360-degree aileron rolls at the flick of a switch. The release gives some basics, videos and other juice are here. This cost $40k, excluding labor, because technically, student labor is "priceless" - so a nod to Kara Sprague, Alex Shterenberg, Ioannis Martinos, Bernard Mettler, and Vlad Gavrilets, who probably provided most of the labor. Stringfellow Hawk has not been reached for comment."

Comments

This isn't the only one

[RevRigel]

Check out the IARC competition website. There are teams' webpages linked from there, too. My school (UT Austin) is planning its first ever entry for the 2002 competition.
The task this year is to fly 3 kilometers along 4 waypoints, identify a building and an open entrance on the building, deploy a subvehicle (not necessary, but practically necessary) through the entrance, and have the subvehicle return reconaissance to the judges 3km away.
Many people opt to use R/C helicopters and modify them (we are using an XCell .60 Gas Graphite by Miniature Aircraft USA).

Doing this for a few years now...

[Pyrosz]

As stated above, its been done and for a LOT cheaper. Yes I read the information and its a little different, but not really... Most modern advanced radio controlled heli's (just like this one) are simple enough to fly with some practice and are all computer controlled already. I can make my helicopter do a loop and a roll without me doing anything but flicking a switch. Its very simple with the computer radios and some simple commands input into the radio. Yes, its stable and I have used my heli to take pictures too. Total cost to me so far ~$2500.