On the development of a small hand-held multi-UAV platform for surveillance and monitoring

This paper addresses the ongoing process of development of a small hand-held multiple unmanned aerial vehicle platform for surveillance and monitoring. The project cover all phases of development, from aerodynamic design and mechanical assembly, through fine tuning low level control loops and design of an attitude and heading reference system, up to implementation of navigation algorithms and finally flight testing. Commercial hardware is used to speed up development, allowing the team responsible for implementing the navigation algorithms to execute and test while the team responsible for the aerodynamics and electronics can design and compare results.