Development of a Fixed Wing Multi-Role Unmanned Aircraft Vehicle Research Testbed
Or D. Dantsker, Miles Johnson, Abdullah Akce, Timothy Bretl · 50th AIAA Aerospace Sciences Meeting including the New Horizons Forum and Aerospace Exposition · 2012
This paper describes the design and construction of a fixed-wing multi-role unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that has served as a platform for research on (a) human-machine interface based teleoperation, (b) new autonomous control algorithms, and (c) system identification of aircraft performance parameters. These tasks require capabilities that generalize to a wide range of small scale UAV research. In particular, we believe that sharing our design and construction approaches can benefit the research community. An important criterion in development of a research model is its ability to support testing and development of new technologies in a time- and cost-effective manner. Our work achieved this and can perform multiple tasks without transitioning or replacing hardware. The platform itself is constructed out of commercial off the shelf components, in order to decrease development time and costs, and is also capable of performing aggressive maneuvering, which is unusual for research UAVs at the 1.8-meter wingspan scale. The platform construction details and code are available and can serve as the basis for development of future unmanned aerial vehicles by the research community. Preliminary flight tests provide proof of concept.