Innovative Micro Air Vehicles & Control Techniques for Urban Environments

Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) will provide an important capability for both military and civilian uses, including reconnaissance, target identification, search and rescue, and bomb damage indication. The development of effective MAVs for these missions will require the production of a real-time autonomous flight navigation and obstacle avoidance system for operation in complex urban environments which is suitable for implementation on these small vehicles. The flight platforms will have limited payloads which will require trade-offs in computational power and sensor type, including sensor resolution and frame rate. To conduct the obstacle detection and collision avoidance Radiance proposes a MAV flight control system that utilizes appropriate sensors in real time to autonomously construct a 3-D obstacle map, which effectively encapsulates physical objects within the MAV''''''''''''''''s potential flight path, and guide the MAV along a safe trajectory that positions the MAV for successful completion of its mission objectives. The geometry building algorithms are envisioned to provide the added benefit of geometric feature extraction and detecting real-time change within the geometry to identify non-cooperative moving objects. BENEFIT: Development of an unmanned system that can operate autonomously and effectively in real-time within complex and highly structured environments without Global Positioning System (GPS) reference or detailed knowledge of features or area details can be a valuable and heavily utilized source for providing information and data to support military operations, search and rescue missions, natural disaster (fire, earthquake, hurricane, et al) assessments, and much more.