OAS Development and Flight Demonstration for A Miniature Rotary Wing UAV

Development of an Obstacle Avoidance System (OAS) and its flight demonstration for miniature rotary wing UAVs navigating unknown urban environments are proposed. The OAS utilizes the Game-theoretic Optimal Deformable Zone including Inertia with LocalApproach (GODZILA) algorithms for autonomous path planning which were developed and validated by simulation during Phase I. Accomplishment of this work exceeded the original Phase I proposed effort and encouraged the proposal of a flight test in Phase II.GODZILA requires no prior knowledge of the geography of the environment, and the algorithm is attractive because it computes a heading command based only on a matrix of scalar sensor measurements. It is not necessary to accurately reconstruct the size andshape of obstacles in order to avoid them, thus greatly reducing the computational and sensor requirements. Realization of the flight test system is fa-cilitated by use of inexpensive Commercial-Off-The-Shelf components including the aircraft it-self,avionics, sensors and ground station, which are simply plugged together, mitigating sched-ule and technical risk. A comprehensive integration and test plan is presented which culminates in the UAV negotiating an urban canyon at low altitude whiletransmitting back live video intel-ligence data as a validation of the practicality of the system.GODZILA has wide-ranging applications to the military and private sectors including manned aircraft obstacle avoidance, Spacecraft and UAV collisionavoidance, Underwater Vehicle obstacle avoidance, pipeline and powerline right of way surveillance, Search and Rescue, and agricultural and livestock monitoring.