Development of micro aerial vehicle systems and autonomous formation flight of multi-mavs

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to design and develop micro aerial vehicle (MAV) systems and to verify formation flight with multi-MAVs. A specific mission profile is proposed for design requirement of vehicle and autopilot system. The aircraft design is carried out by conventional design procedures. Thin airfoil theory is applied to analyze and develop vehicle``s airfoil. An In-house CATIA - MATLAB code is developed for airfoil analysis. The power system is chosen by using a thrust calculator with various motors, propellers and batteries. The MAV``s linear SISO longitudinal dynamics and lateral dynamics are obtained using MATLAB Identification Toolbox for controller design. The autopilot controller for autonomous navigation flight consists of attitude, altitude hold and waypoint navigation guidance loop. The multi-loop classical controller is implemented for attitude control in inner loop. The controller is designed based on that identification results. A high speed flight computer system is developed to operate multi-flight processes such as navigation, GPS, communication process and so on. An autopilot is integrated by combinations of GPS, IMU, flight computer and PWM board. It is applicable to advanced control techniques due to its high speed and powerful performance. The autonomous waypoint flight result with this system shows good performance. Finally, the guidance laws for formation flight are designed via ``leader - follower`` formation method using active link for inter-communication. The guidance laws are verified through a series of formation flight tests. During the formation flight tests, the follower can track and keep the formation with leader.