Autopilot Design for Vision Assisted Autonomous Fixed Wing Micro Air Vehicle

In this paper, an integrated autopilot named Autosky is presented for fixed wing micro air vehicle (MAV). Due to space and payload restrictions in MAV, integration of vision processing module onboard is difficult and often requires additional hardware with the autopilot. Autosky is capable of generating control commands and doing visual processing onboard, thus eliminating the need to have any additional hardware with it. Autosky has two configurations, namely, in-flight and docked configuration; the in-flight configuration is lean and highly optimized for vision-assisted autonomous navigation of fixed wing MAV, while the docked configuration provides ease of use in the HILS/SILS environment and debugging. This integrated autopilot is deployed for flights in Skylark MAV.¹