Avionics Design for a Sub-Scale Fault- Tolerant Flight Control Test-Bed

1. For carrying remote sensing or other scientific payloads. Highly publicized examples of such applications include the forest fire detection effort jointly conducted by NASA Ames research centre and the US Forest Service (Ambrosia et al., 2004), and the mission into the eye of hurricane Ophelia by an Aerosonde® UAV (Cione et al., 2008); 2. For evaluating different sensing and decision-making strategies as an autonomous vehicle. For examples, an obstacle and terrain avoidance experiment was performed at Brigham Young University to navigate a small UAV in the Goshen canyon (Griffiths et al., 2006); an autonomous formation flight experiment was performed at West Virginia University (WVU) with three turbine-powered UAVs (Gu et al., 2009); 3. As a sub-scale test bed to help solving known or potential issues facing full-scale manned aircraft. For example, a series of flight test experiments were performed at Rockwell Collins (Jourdan et al., 2010) with a sub-scale F-18 aircraft to control and recover the aircraft after wing damages. Another example is the X-48B blended wing body aircraft (Liebeck, 2004) jointly developed by Boeing and NASA to investigate new design concepts for future-generation transport aircraft.