Optimizing multidisciplinary scaled tests in terrestrial atmosphere for extraterrestrial unmanned aerial vehicle missions

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles are a valid tool for exploring celestial objects that have atmosphere. The design process of these vehicles includes numerical analysis phase, which is then followed by an experimental flight test campaign in order to validate and refine the design. In terrestrial conditions, it is impossible to use the full size prototype and recreate all the conditions of extraterrestrial flight. The only option is to use a scaled model maintaining certain similarity parameters to the prototype. This would, however, not reproduce the global multidisciplinary behavior in terrestrial conditions. Alternatively, relaxing similarity constraints enables reproducing the global multidisciplinary behavior but introduces known and measurable similarity differences. The objective of this study is to provide a methodology for designing a relaxed similarity scaled model for terrestrial multidisciplinary tests for any extraterrestrial unmanned aerial vehicle. The methodology is then applied to a case scenario in order to verify its validity.

A novel fast target tracking method for UAV aerial image

“…Particularly, UAV system receives video frames obtained by a nadir camera, and then input texture features to the image sequence target tracking system. Furthermore, in real flights, information of rotating and scaling of the frames should be corrected to enhance the performance of the UAV onboard instruments navigation [8].…”