Draft to be Submitted to 5th IFAC Symposium on Intelligent Autonomous Vehicles (IAV2004). 1 A Distributed Architecture for Intelligent Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Experimentation

The emerging area of intelligent unmanned aerial ve-hicle (UAV) research has shown rapid development in recent years and offers a great number of research chal-lenges for artificial intelligence. In this article, a pro-totype distributed architecture for intelligent unmanned aerial vehicle experimentation is presented which sup-ports the development of intelligent capabilities and their integration in a robust, scalable, plug-and-play hardware/software architecture. The architecture itself uses real-time CORBA to support its infrastructure and it is based on a reactive concentric software control phi-losophy. A number of capabilities of the architecture are presented including a multi-mode flight control sys-tem for a Yamaha RMAX VTOL platform, an on-board path planning service and a dynamically reconfigurable image processing system. A research prototype system has been built, is operational and is being used in actual missions. In the article, we emphasize the characteris-tics of the architecture which support the integration of numerous AI technologies