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Rapid prototyping flight test environment for autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles

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journal contribution
posted on 2012-12-14, 10:22 authored by Cunjia LiuCunjia Liu, Jonty Clarke, Wen-Hua ChenWen-Hua Chen, J.D. Andrews
Test facility is essential for most engineering research activities, from modelling and identification to verification of algorithms/methods and final demonstration. It is well known that flight tests for aerospace vehicles are expensive and quite risky. To overcome this, this paper describes a rapid prototyping platform for autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) developed at Loughborough University, where a number of unmanned aerial and ground vehicles can perform various flight and other missions under computer control. Flexibility, maintainability and low expenses are assured by a proper choice of vehicles, sensors and system architecture. Among many other technical challenges, precision navigation of the unmanned vehicles and system integrations of commercial-off-the-shelf components from different vendors with different operational environments are discussed in detail. Matlab/Simulink based software development environment provides a seamless rapid prototyping platform from concept and theoretic developments to numerical simulation and finally flight tests. Finally, two scenarios performed by this test facility are presented to illustrate its capability.

History

School

  • Aeronautical, Automotive, Chemical and Materials Engineering

Department

  • Aeronautical and Automotive Engineering

Citation

LIU, C. ... et al, 2011. Rapid prototyping flight test environment for autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles. International Journal of Modelling, Identification and Control, 12 (3), pp. 200 - 209

Publisher

© Inderscience Enterprises

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publication date

2011

Notes

This article was published in the serial, International Journal of Modelling, Identification and Control [© Inderscience Enterprises]. The definitive version is available at: http://inderscience.metapress.com/content/u088807400671504/

ISSN

1746-6172

eISSN

1746-6180

Language

  • en