Development of Fixed Wing Micro Air Vehicle with Semi Auto-Pilot System

Abstract

Since 1990, research on micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) less than 15 cm dimension has been widely conducted for potential use in commercial and military applications. Fixed-wing MAVs even less than 13 cm dimension with cameras can fly very well, which was thought to be impossible about ten years ago. Since 1997 we have studied the technologies related with the MAV and developed a fixed-wing MAV “Batwing” and won the first prize in the surveillance mission of the 9th International MAV Competition in 2005, which is the world smallest MAV record for surveillance mission. MAV less than 15cm is small enough not to be recognized as MAV with human eyes, however the stable flight with the remote control by viewing the transmitted pilot view video image is too difficult mission for a soldier with basic radio control pilot training. Easy remote piloting with stable automatic attitude control and semi-autopilot system is quite necessary to expand the utilization of MAV up to a platoon unit of the military system. In this paper, we developed a fixed wing micro air vehicle which can be piloted semi-automatically. We tried to install the developed semi-autopilot control system on the micro air vehicle platform of which wing span is about 50cm. It was possible to reduce the weight of the structure by using lightweight carbon/epoxy composite structures and small IMU and control systems with ultra-light MEMS parts.