Rapid Flight Test Prototyping System and the Fleet of UAV's and MAVs at the Naval Postgraduate School

Abstract

*† ‡ § This paper describes the development and application of a rapid prototyping system for flight testing of autonomous flight algorithms for unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) at the Naval Postgraduate School. The system provides a small team with the ability to rapidly prototype new theoretical concepts and flight-test their performance in realistic mission scenarios. The original development was done using MATRIXX Xmath/SystemBuild environment almost a decade ago. Currently, the system has been converted to the Mathworks MATLAB/Simulink development environment. The fleet of UAVs currently available at the NPS includes several fixed-wing airplanes with wing-spans of up to 3.5m all the way down to flapping-wing micro UAVs (MAVs) with wings spans as small as 23cm. The paper describes the hardware and software tools currently adopted for the system and briefly discusses the variety of projects that have included path following algorithms, voice control, vision based navigation for shipboard landing, autoland system development, etc. I. Introduction HE past two decades have witnessed a dramatic increase in the utilization of unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) by the armed forces, both in the US and abroad. More recently, many researchers in the academic community have realized the usefulness of UAVs both as teaching and research tools. The development of UAVs and their flight control systems requires addressing a number of engineering problems in a wide range of issues that include weight and energy restrictions, portability, risk factors, electronic interference, vibrations and manpower, to name but a few. Furthermore, the testing of new algorithms, sensor packages, and vehicles is truly a multi-disciplinary effort that borrows from many branches of the engineering sciences that include aeronautic, electrical, and computer engineering. This effort is costly and time consuming, and has the potential for catastrophic failure. When successfully done, however, it provides developmental information, insight, and field data that are unavailable from other sources. Since all theoretical and numerical results must be verified by some form of experiment, flight-testing is clearly the best way to achieve those goals. Motivated by these considerations, and as a contribution towards the development of a versatile set-up for advanced UAV system design and testing, the UAV lab at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) developed a so-called Rapid Flight Test Prototyping System (RFTPS) for a prototype UAV. This paper briefly describes the RFTPS, including available UAVs and explains how it is being used as a rapid proof-of-concept tool for testing new guidance, navigation, and control algorithms for different applications. The paper starts with a general discussion of the RFTPS including the main motivation behind its development, system capabilities, hardware description, and a fleet of vehicles currently employed at the NPS for different research and development projects. The second part focuses on the description of the RFTPS capabilities that were demonstrated on several occasions while the new guidance, navigation and control (GNC) algorithms were taken from theoretical development to a flight test in no time.