Design and Assembly of an Experimental Fixed Wing Remote Controlled Glider Plane

Abstract

In order to enable a mini-UAV to perform target acquisition, localization and continuous surveillance in real world environment one must develop a technology which may be a combination of aircraft engineering, control systems, and wireless communication. The major limiting factors in developing the capabilities of small low cost UAVs are connectivity, computational processing power and lack of resource integration. To overcome these limitations in this research we have tried to assemble an experimental fixed wing prototype glider plane capable of being remotely controlled in the range of 20 meters. We started with a light and flexible fat-propylene twine flute material and developed the airframe, interfaced it with radio controlled remote and embedded on-board micro controller on the glider airframe. Our glider took stable flight with the assembled propeller for 20 minutes successfully. The brushless DC servomotors used for electronic speed control of the UAV worked efficiently and were able to control the rudder and elevator in both directions. The significance of this research is that all the devices used here are low cost and highly efficient. In this paper we have investigated the use of reconfigurable computing as a viable alternative to increase the amount of computational power whilst at the same time minimizing the amount of weight, size, and power consumption.