With unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), 36 licensed pilots flew both single-UAV and dual-UAV simulated military missions. Pilots were required to navigate each UAV through a series of mission legs in one of the following three conditions: a baseline condition, an auditory autoalert condition, and an autopilot condition. Pilots were responsible for (a) mission completion, (b) target search, and (c...

This paper presents the design of a dual controlled (manual as well as autopilot) Deployable Low Cost Outdoor Surveillance system. This model provides situational awareness by obtaining realtime information in outdoor applications. The aircraft is designed to have wingspan of less than 6 feet capable of carrying autopilot system and useful payload. This highly autonomous flight control system h...

Over recent years, a number of marine autopilots designed using linear techniques have underperformed owing to their inability to cope with nonlinear vessel dynamics. To this end, a new design framework for the development of nonlinear autopilots is proposed. Local Control Networks (LCNs) can be used in the design of nonlinear control systems. In this paper, a LCN approach is taken in the desig...

SkyScanner is a project whose mission is to guide a fleet of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to actively gather data in low-altitude cumulus clouds with the aim of mapping atmospheric variables. This report presents the work done for the SkyScanner project at LAAS-CNRS to design and implement a simulation software architecture for a fleet of UAVs. The new software package, based on the Robot Op...

This paper describes the development of a fuzzy autopilot for controlling the non-linear yaw dynamics of an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) model. The autopilot design is based on a new approach that uses a Gaussian fuzzy inference mechanism. For the design study, the AUV model is hosted in the MATLAB/Simulink environment. Simulation results are presented which illustrate the potential of t...

In this paper we present a centralised flightby-wire system based on μ-synthesis approach to the longitudinal flight motion of our experimental flying wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), P15035 aircraft. The challenge associated with our UAV is related to the fact that all motions of our UAV are controlled by two independently-actuated-ailerons, together with its throttle. The first reason for ...

The fundamental objective of autopilot design for missile systems is to provide stability with satisfactory performance and robustness over the whole range of flight conditions throughout the entire flight envelope that missiles are required to operate in, during all probable engagements. Depending on the control mode (skid-to-turn or bank-to-turn), intercept scenario (such as surface to surfac...

A new autopilot design for bank-to-turn (BTT) missiles is presented. In the design of autopilot, a ridge Gaussian neural network with local learning capability and fewer tuning parameters than Gaussian neural networks is proposed to model the controlled nonlinear systems. We prove that the proposed ridge Gaussian neural network, which can be a universal approximator, equals the expansions of ro...