Improved Architecture Designs for a Low Cost Personal Remote Sensing Platform: Flight Control and Safety

Abstract

Remote sensing is a field traditionally dominated by expensive, large-scale operations. This paper presents our efforts to improve our unmanned aircraft (UA) platforms for low-cost personal remote sensing purposes. Safety concerns are first emphasized regarding the local airspace and multiple fail-safe features are shown in the current system. Then the AggieAir unmanned system architecture is briefly described including the Paparazzi UA autopilot, AggieAir JAUS implementation, AggieNav navigation unit and payload integration. Some preliminary flight test results and images acquired using an example thermal IR payload system are also shown. Finally Multi-UAV and heterogeneous platform capabilities are discussed with respect to their applications. Based on our approaches on the new architecture design, personal remote sensing on smaller-scale operations can be more beneficial and common.1

Battery model-based thrust controller for a small, low cost multirotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

“…AggieAir( [2], [3]) is a small, low-cost, autonomous, multispectral remote sensing platform [4], which has been developed over the last few years at the Center for Self Organizing and Intelligent Systems (CSOIS) at Utah State University (USU).…”