In a smaller aircraft, you're relying a lot more on your forward momentum (i.e. forward airspeed) to cushion your landing, whereas in a larger helicopter the rotor inertia has enough energy such that you can place it straight down on pretty much any flat surface the system can find. Garmin already has something called Smart Glide for fixed wing aircraft where it calculates engine out trajectories, and so I don't see this as something impossible with a helicopter. Especially coupled with a wire strike cut (basically just a sharp knife sticking out of the front of the helicopter that just cuts any cables you run into).
I'd think given the use cases for some helicopter flights (e.g. sightseeing tours) where you're typically in VFR weather there's certainly an opportunity to have automated flights. I agree we're not there yet, but I don't see it as impossible in the near future.
(I mainly fly fixed-wing, but I have about 50 hours in an R22)
You are correct that a lot can be automated, but if there is anything that cannot be, humans have to be in the cockpit. And if humans have to be in the cockpit, then we actually don't want as much automation as possible. [1] See also [2].
The biggest problem I see with automating helicopter flight is that the hardest part of an autorotation is picking a spot to land. I don't think that can be automated. You would either have to have super high resolution radar pointed at the ground or high resolution computer vision that can identify flat spots which are as varied as the human race. I don't think either is feasible anytime soon. And that's without even considering the higher power draw they would require, as a sibling comment mentions.
Then you have to consider what happens in the case of full power outage, including no battery. In that case, you have effectively doomed the people onboard if there is not a real pilot.
[1]: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/airline-pilots-depend-t...
The key quote is this: "You still need someone with training in communications protocols, what speed and elevation to fly and where the system is unsafe to operate."
Flying a helicopter is, by its nature, unsafe to operate. At any moment, you could have an emergency. If you have someone at the controls who only knows joystick flight when any such emergency occurs, good luck to them.
Helicopters are not like airplanes; they are not a "set and forget" experience. You have to actually fly the helicopter from point A to point B. You have to be ready to make that helicopter drop at a moment's notice because if the engine dies, you need air blowing up through the rotor to keep it spinning. If it slows down enough, that is automatically "Game Over". (Search "rotor stall".) In the helicopter I flew, you had two seconds to get the collective down, and that was only the beginning.
Watch [1]. At 1:24, the engine dies, and you hear a horn almost immediately. That's the low rotor speed horn. The horn goes off after about a second; that's because the pilot slammed the collective full down.
Then the pilot turns left and crash lands. Why? Because there were wires in front of him. The wires could have flipped the helicopter. Would a bot have flown into those wires? Almost certainly, and everyone would be dead.
Oh, and did you notice that the low rotor speed horn was sounding a lot during the crash sequence? That's because during such an event, you have to maintain the rotor speed in balance while trying to pick a spot and bring the helicopter in. He had a full helicopter, so he actually couldn't force the rotor speed much higher. And yet he couldn't go full down either because that would not slow them down near the ground.
In other words, those guys are lucky that their pilot is awesome. And even though he was, they still landed hard.
On top of that, as dmitrygr says [2], flying the helicopter is a fraction of what you have to do.
I would never fly in a helicopter where the "pilot" was anything but.
And the same goes for airplanes. They may be able to fly themselves, but that is only true in non-emergencies. And even in some non-emergencies.
Pilots are expensive because they train for the worst, and most of the time, when it does happen, they handle it with aplomb.
Bots will not. When it comes down to it, bots will never replace humans where life-threatening emergencies can happen.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYBf3XPwvaU
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28995347