There are a ton of these tiny RC Helicopters around, lots of them use IR light to send signals from the remote to the RC Helicopter. Arduino versus Evil took one apart to see what makes it tick. The helicopter doesn’t have much payload capability but it seems to be quite nimble. Since it is just IR it should be simple to reverse engineer the commands for various movements. Once the codes are in hand you would be able to use something like an Arduino to take control although without a complex vision system I am thinking you would just be giving a human another way of flying the toy.