Paving the Way for Future Low-Flying Autonomous Micro Aerial Vehicles with an Unmanned Rotorcraft Demonstrator

Abstract

Micro Air Vehicles are small unmanned aircraft, that are to be operated autonomously or semiautonomously. The paper describes a unmanned aircraft research project at the DLR Institute of Flight Systems for the evaluation of intelligent systems and functions for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) utilizing an inexpensive multi-purpose rotary wing research platform. The design of the rotorcraft UAV as well as the research agenda for the project is being introduced, providing an outlook on planned areas of small UAV related research at DLR. Sensors and software algorithms that are being tested on this research vehicle will have a significant impact on the capabilities of future miniaturized UAV systems. Exemplary are the experiments with a real-time onboard image processing system that can be used for vehicle motion tracking and obstacle detection. Imaging based methods combined with a high level mission planning architecture are going to be used for a generic collision avoidance system for UAV and MAV.