SkyOnyx: Autonomous UAV Research Platform for Air Transportation System (ATSys)

The Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are receiving more focus in order to execute a wide variety of applications. Recently, several investigations are carried-on for the idea of Air Transportation System (ATSys). ATSys governs the elements and services that are correlated to the transportation of either passengers or cargo. Accordingly, in this paper, a novel UAV research platform is introduced, with the capabilities of air navigation and air transportation. The platform is called SkyOnyx, it has several on-board sensors for the environment perception, micro-controller for the navigation, and embedded computer for the overall control and processing all acquisition data. SkyOnyx is able to perform several localization techniques, multiple perception solutions, and robust high-level control. Furthermore, for functionality validation, several experiments were carried-out to verify the proposed Extended $\mathrm{H}_{\infty}$ -based fusion algorithm for multiple input odometries. The obtained results prove the high performance of the proposed approach, along with the efficiency of the research platform.