New Generation of Rapid Flight Test Prototyping System for small Unmanned Air Vehicles

This paper describes the development and application of a rapid prototyping system for flight testing of novel autonomous flight algorithms for unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) at the Naval Postgraduate School. The system provides a small team with the ability to rapidly prototype new theoretical concepts and flight-test their performance in realistic mission scenarios. The original development was done using MATRIXX Xmath/SystemBuild environment almost a decade ago. Currently, the system has been converted to the Mathworks MATLAB/Simulink development environment. This paper describes the hardware and software tools developed for the system and briefly discusses the variety of projects including vision-based target tracking, 3D path following, SUAV control over the network and high-resolution imagery on the fly.

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