Autonomous aerial vehicles, guidance, control and signal processing platform

This paper presents the work done in the field of autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle test bed UAV development at American University of Sharjah. The key areas for establishing the system includes flight control system development for accomplishing complete autonomous flight, design and evaluation of avionics unit and air-data system, and image acquisition and target geolocation. The development include the low level autopilots, the guidance algorithm for way point navigation, INS-GPS sensor fusion, signal processing, ground-station, and gimbaled camera payload integration. The test bed was prototyped using hardware in the loop simulation using mpc555 embedded system and simulink tools. The paper summarizes flight test results for auto-takeoff and landing, trajectory tracking, waypoint navigation, and target tracking. Simulation results for control and navigation of UAV are presented and discussed. Experimental results from real flight tests validate the control, navigation and targeting tracking algorithms.