Development of a flight test system for unmanned air vehicles

The past two decades have witnessed a dramatic increase in the use of Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs) by the armed forces, both in the US and abroad. More recently, many researchers in the academic community have realized the usefulness of UAVs both as teaching and research tools. To develop UAVs and their flight control systems, a number of engineering problems must be addressed covering a wide range of issues that include weight and energy restrictions, portability, risk factors, electronic interferences, vibrations and manpower. Furthermore, the testing of new algorithms, sensor packages, and vehicles is a truly multidisciplinary effort that borrows from many branches of the engineering sciences that include aeronautic, electrical, and computer engineering. The process is costly and time consuming, and has the potential for catastrophic failure. When successfully completed, however, it provides developmental information, insight, and field data that cannot be obtained from other sources-thus the importance to develop systems to enable rapid flight testing of new theoretical/practical concepts. Motivated by these considerations, and as a contribution towards the development of a versatile set-up for advanced UAV system design and testing, the Naval Postgraduate School has recently completed development of a rapid flight test prototyping system (RFTPS) for a prototype UAV named Frog. This paper describes the complete RFTPS system that uses the Frog UAV and a portable ground station, and explains how it is being used as a rapid proof-of-concept tool for testing new guidance, navigation, and control algorithms for air vehicles. The paper starts with a general discussion of thr Rapid Flight Test Prototyping System (RFTPS) including the main motivation behind its development as well as the system capabilities, cost and safety requirements, and hardware description. The second part focuses on the modeling of the Frog UAV and describes briefly a novel integrated guidance and control system for precise trajectory tracking that was introduced in [1]. Finally, it is shown how the RFTPS was used to develop and flight test the integrated guidance and control system. The full capabilities of the RFTPS are demonstrated when the new algorithm is taken from theoretical development to flight test on the UAV Fmg operated by thr UAV Lab at the Naval Postgraduate School.