1st UAV Navigation and Servo Control Instrumentation: Flight Test Results

This paper presents the navigation and flight control system of the mini-Unmanned Aerial Vehicle named 1st-FIRST that is under development at Department of Aerospace Engineering(DIAS) of University of Naples “Federico II”. DIAS is carrying out a project aimed at developing an autonomous system capable of performing airborne surveillance and autonomous flight. The autonomous flight control system is based on a hardware produced by Crossbow™. The onboard software is designed to operate in different modes depending on the type of navigation and control selected by ground pilot. Integrated navigation state estimate is generated in real-time and data from pressure transducers is used to estimate true air speed. Automatic flight control in closed loop will be implemented with way point selection capability. The paper reports on results of the first flight test session. Real time data from onboard sensors, that were collected during the flight, are completely reported in the paper. GPS data and data from pressure transducers are combined to estimate wind speed. A comparison between onboard data and data transferred to ground is provided in order to highlight limits and capacities of the adopted telemetry system. Finally, this paper presents the design methodology used in developing the data collection for system identification: flight data were recorded while performing control surface doublets about a trimmed trajectory