Development, System Integration and Flight Testing of a High-Resolution Imaging System for Small UAS

Autonomous feature following for visual surveillance using a small unmanned aerial vehicle with gimbaled camera system

“…The gimbaled system has the pan and tilt channels driven by two high-speed digital servos which are actuated through a serial-PWM 12 bit controller connected to the RISC ATMEGA-169 8-bit microcontroller (8MHz) which is the central component of the architecture that implements gimbal control through integration of line-of-sight (LOS) rate measurements (tri-axial sensor head), and gimbal reference commands sent from onboard GNC SBC PC104 computer [4]. The LOS inertial stabilization technique is based on the subtraction of the UAV Euler angular rates measured in inertial space from the gimbal reference commands.…”

“…For feature tracking application a Rascal UAV as a rapid flight test prototyping system (RTFPS) for small unmanned air vehicles (SUAVs) developed at the Center for Autonomous Vehicle Research in the Naval Postgraduate School is utilized for hardware-in-the-loop simulation and real flight test experiment [4]. The new RTFPS integrated avionics system architecture that includes all the principal components along with the Piccolo plus autopilot [14], and an overhead view of the avionics is shown in Fig.…”

“…Majority of the commercial autopilots available for flight control of the UAVs employs traditional way-point (WP) navigation [4]. However, the WP navigation is not suited for aggressive and complex flight trajectory for visual target tracking applications since it might require long straight line segments for precise camera pointing [5].…”