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OAS Development and Flight Demonstration for A Miniature Rotary Wing UAV

Award Information
Agency: Department of Defense
Branch: Army
Contract: W911NF-04-C-0002
Agency Tracking Number: A012-2192
Amount: $729,985.00
Phase: Phase II
Program: SBIR
Solicitation Topic Code: N/A
Solicitation Number: N/A
Timeline
Solicitation Year: N/A
Award Year: 2003
Award Start Date (Proposal Award Date): N/A
Award End Date (Contract End Date): N/A
Small Business Information
2009 Huntcliff Drive
Gambrills, MD 02154
United States
DUNS: 125532908
HUBZone Owned: No
Woman Owned: No
Socially and Economically Disadvantaged: No
Principal Investigator
 Stephen Fujikawa
 President
 (410) 721-1027
 sfujikawa@ase.w1.com
Business Contact
 Walter Grossman
Title: Vice President
Phone: (703) 969-7473
Email: wgrossman@ase.w1.com
Research Institution
N/A
Abstract

Development of an Obstacle Avoidance System (OAS) and its flight demonstration for miniature rotary wing UAVs navigating unknown urban environments are proposed. The OAS utilizes the Game-theoretic Optimal Deformable Zone including Inertia with LocalApproach (GODZILA) algorithms for autonomous path planning which were developed and validated by simulation during Phase I. Accomplishment of this work exceeded the original Phase I proposed effort and encouraged the proposal of a flight test in Phase II.GODZILA requires no prior knowledge of the geography of the environment, and the algorithm is attractive because it computes a heading command based only on a matrix of scalar sensor measurements. It is not necessary to accurately reconstruct the size andshape of obstacles in order to avoid them, thus greatly reducing the computational and sensor requirements. Realization of the flight test system is fa-cilitated by use of inexpensive Commercial-Off-The-Shelf components including the aircraft it-self,avionics, sensors and ground station, which are simply plugged together, mitigating sched-ule and technical risk. A comprehensive integration and test plan is presented which culminates in the UAV negotiating an urban canyon at low altitude whiletransmitting back live video intel-ligence data as a validation of the practicality of the system.GODZILA has wide-ranging applications to the military and private sectors including manned aircraft obstacle avoidance, Spacecraft and UAV collisionavoidance, Underwater Vehicle obstacle avoidance, pipeline and powerline right of way surveillance, Search and Rescue, and agricultural and livestock monitoring.

* Information listed above is at the time of submission. *

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