Innovative Micro Air Vehicles & Control Techniques for Urban Environments

The objective of this proposed effort is to develop improved algorithms for Micro Air Vehicles to allow operation in urban canyons and loitering in areas of interest. This work will build on existing algorithms for developed for vehicle control and sensing the complex urban environment developed by NAVSYS and researchers at MIT. The proposed approach will provide adaptive non-linear flight control algorithms that can provide hover capability for fixed wing aircraft. This approach allows the advantages of fixed wing aircraft speed and flight distance to be combined with the surveillance advantages of hovering craft. Under Phase I we will: extending the robustness of existing flight control algorithms for the extreme flight dynamics that can be anticipated in the urban environment by incorporating adaptive model reference control; extending the development of dynamic trajectory planning used successfully in MIT’s Grand Challenge vehicle to MAV applications; using new, computationally efficient, feature extraction algorithms that will allow robust navigation through the complex urban environment for collision avoidance even when GPS signals are unavailable or degraded. Under Phase I we will develop the algorithm design and provide simulation results to demonstrate the expected performance of a system to be flight test under Phase II.