Mini‐UAV remote control: A case study at Politecnico di Torino

Abstract

Recent development of modern micro and nano technologies allows aerospace vehicles extremely small size to be constructed. Wide availability and mass production of small dimension components drastically reduce the price of such vehicles. This fact allows them to be constructed by Universities and it makes them useful for education. The Aerospace Systems Engineering Research Group (ASSET) at Politecnico di Torino the design, development and testing small, but quite complex, integrated systems. The goal of this paper is to present one of the contemporary works of this group: the Mini-UAV “ASSET” remote control/flight simulator site. This paper contains a short presentation of the Mini-UAV, a description of its onboard and ground systems and the use of COTS components. The paper explains how the ground control site has also been designed to run as a flight simulator. For this purpose MICROSOFT FLIGHT SIMULATOR for 3D scenario visualization and Matlab/Simulink for airplane and environmental modeling has been used and integrated. In the system are included possibilities of ALTIA Design software exploitation for avionic display visualization. In particular some new modes for HUD, conceived and simulated, are presented and discussed in the paper. The hardware configuration of the Remote Control System/Flight Simulator is briefly described.

First Published Online: 14 Oct 2010