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Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
Airplanes without pilots have been used and built for many years, both as a hobby by model airplane
enthusiasts and by the military for the use in aerial warfare particularly as a reconnaissance tool.
By far the larger part of these military systems control the airplane by remote piloting - the pilot being
removed from the plane and in safety on the ground. The technical challenges here are mainly to
ensure an uninterrupted communication link between pilot and control, to relay adequate and relevant
airplane information to the pilot and to include a control system for handling the plane sensibly in the case of communication link failure.
AU has initiated research of a new kind of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that endeavours to remove
the pilot altogether, and to investigate an autonomous system for flight control. It is the goal of this
investigation that the control system will control the airplane to autonomously take off from a landing
strip, conduct a series of manoeuvres and return to land safely on the landing strip. The commands to
the control system are established through a description of a route map by a series of waypoints.
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An artist's impression of the UAV currently under constrction at IAU. |
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The research concentrates on the following areas:
- aircraft dynamic modeling
- aircraft design
- sensor fusion and Kalman filtering
- control and instrumentation system integration
The research involves the development of an instrumentation package for attitude and position
determination based on inertial and GPS data. A high level of accuracy is achieved through the
application of Kalman filtering and sensor fusion. Inertial measurements are obtained using
commercially available miniature vibrating beam rate gyros and chip accelerometers. Absolute
position is measured using a civilian grade differential GPS. These instruments communicate with a
flight control system using a common CAN-bus. Each instrument is completely self contained with its own onboard 16-bit micro controller from Fujitsu with on chip CAN interface.
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A microcontroller board developed at DTU. |
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In order to investigate the performance of the complete system a test plane is being constructed. This
is a small 2-meter wing span canard type plane with a ducted fan propulsion system in the tail. The
total weight of the plane is 7 kg (14.5 lb) and the range currently limited to a few kilometres.
Our research in this area is planned to have different applications in the areas of surveillance, search
and rescues and reconnaissance. For instance we foresee the UAV used in oil spill detection in coastal
water, ground level radiation monitoring, crop yield assessment for determination of pesticide and/or fertilizer application and many others.
Links:
 31365 Spacecraft Attitude Control
 Promotion folder
Internal homepage for the autonomous systems group
Other Projects
A popular description of the system (In Danish)
UAV Homepage (AUVSI)
NASA UAV Homepage
Contacts:
Ole Jannerup <oej@oersted.dtu.dk >
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