Research

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Research

CUSL‘s research interest is in the areas of estimation, control, and dynamics of unmanned vehicles with an emphasis on unmanned aerial vehicles. Current focus is on vision-aided navigation, wind/gust estimation, cooperative control, remote sensing, and small UAV development.

Active Projects:

Small Unmanned System Development for Scientific Researches

Small unmanned autonomous systems can be deployed for different scientific research projects including but not limited to aviation safety research, atmospheric measurement, agricultural/environment monitoring, emergency response, etc.

KHawk - Flying Wing UAV

KHawk UAV is supported by self-configured Paparazzi Open Source Autopilot. Image acquisition software is currently under developing. (KHawk 48"-1 Finished in Jan. 2014 by Zorig Bat and O'Neil Elizabeth) KHawk FlyingWing-48 UAV Specifications Wingspan 48 inch Weight 4 lbs Cruise Speed 15 m/s Fight Endurance ~30 min Control Surface Two Elevens Power Electric Motor Take-off Bungee Payload GoPro Hero II Autopilot Papparazzi Autopilot

KHawk 48"-1 Flight Test

1. KHawk flying-wing-48 manual takeoff

2. KHawk Flying Wing 48 Auto-Circling

Wind/Gust/Wake Sensing and Suppression with Aircraft Formation Flight

Birds fly in V or echelon formations for energy saving as well as enemy defense. The follower bird usually flies in the wakes generated by the leader bird. However, it is unclear how exactly birds interact with the wake vortices during close formation flight. Small UAVs offer ideal platforms for further understanding of the interaction between the aircraft and the flow field such as wake vortices generated by the leader aircraft. Such researches could potentially lead to significant fuel saving of commercial flights and help decreasing the waiting time at airport terminals.

Optical-flow-based navigation for small UAVs

Optical flow has been used by insects and birds for navigation functions such as obstacle avoidance, speed regulation, landing, etc. It also has big potentials to support small UAVs for short-range navigation in GPS-degraded or GPS-denied environments.

Former Research Projects:

• Low-Cost Small UAS Development for Remote Sensing
• Lateral Channel Fractional Order Flight Controller Design for a Small UAV
• Consensus Algorithms for Multi-vehicle Cooperative Control
• Cooperative Sensing and Distributed Control of a Diffusion Process Using Centroidal Voronoi Tessellations
• Avionics Development for Phastball UAV