Development, Test and Evaluation of an Integrated GNC System for Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Abstract

For their size and cost advantage, small or so called man-portable unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) have gathered considerable interests over the past few years. Although these vehicles may be considered inexpensive and dispensable, the imposed mission requirements are very demanding and complex relying on fully autonomous and intelligent self decision making operations. Most of small UAV currently in service utilizes commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) autopilot which often puts constraints on vehicle maneuverability and programming flexibility. The motivation for this study is to develop an integrated guidance, navigation and control (GNC) system that provides flexibility in various engineering aspects of small UAV, ranging from a new platform design to autopilot synthesis. This paper presents some results from the initial design and development effort; hardware integration of necessary sensors, a processor selection, and flight testing. Strap-down inertial navigation principle is considered. Flight test data are utilized for the post-flight numerical studies in order to understand the system limitations and characteristics, which is a crucial step for the software design.