Software Enabled Control Experiments with University Operated Unmanned Aircraft

On August 25, 2004, a series of flight experiments and demonstrations were flown at the McKenna urban operations complex at Ft. Benning, GA. These experiments represented the culmination of the rotary wing segment of the DARPA Software Enabled Control program. To support these efforts, an open system Unmanned Aerial Vehicle testbed architecture was developed for the GTMax and GTSpy university-operated research aircraft. This paper includes a description of these systems, and then discusses results from the final experiments. This includes: fault-tolerant flight control, adaptive flight control, fault detection and accommodation, reconfigurable control, trajectory generation, envelope protection, vision-aided inertial navigation, vision-based obstacle avoidance, and the first air-launching of a hovering aircraft.