Rapid Flight Test Prototyping System and the Fleet of UAVs 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.