Aerospace Control and Guidance Systems Committee

Announcements

You must first log in to access prior meeting presentations, register for a meeting, or nominate some for the Ward Award.

If you do not have a login account, or cannot remember the email address associated with your account, please click on the Application Form link below.

Login

Site Search

Search our site:

Upcoming Events

Photos

Meeting Highlights New!

Subcommittee S

Prior Meetings

Abstracts may be viewed by anyone. Presentations are only available to active members who have logged in.

Meeting 132
(coming soon)

Home

Ward Memorial Award

Planning Advisory Board

Downloads

Constitution and By-Laws

About

History

Contact Us

← Return to agenda

Meeting	ACGS Committee Meeting 95 - Salt Lake City - March 2005
Agenda Location	7 SUBCOMMITTEE A - AERONAUTIC AND SURFACE 7.3 Full Mission Simulation of a Rotorcraft Unmanned Aerial Vehicle for Landing in a Non-Cooperative Environment
Title	Full Mission Simulation of a Rotorcraft Unmanned Aerial Vehicle for Landing in a Non-Cooperative Environment
Presenter	Dr. Colin Theodore
Affiliation	Army/NASA Rotorcraft Division
Available Downloads*	presentation
	Downloads are available to members who are logged in and either Active* or attended this meeting.
Abstract	Accurate, reliable autonomous landing of Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) remains a challenging and important capability for operational systems to achieve greater mission flexibility, less operator involvement and more rapid sortie turnaround. However, current technologies for the landing of UAVs are mostly limited to using an external pilot, recovery net, or auto-land capability requiring landing site based instrumentation or radar. These current technologies preclude UAVs from landing in un-prepared environments where the terrain profile is unknown and possibly cluttered. In addition to this, in a cluttered environment such as an urban canyon, GPS signals may be intermittent (due to occlusion or jamming) and cannot be relied upon for guidance and navigation. This presentation presents interim results of a US Army Science and Technology (STO) program that is formulated to address some of the current limitations with the landing of VTOL UAVs. The Precision Autonomous Landing Adaptive Control Experiment (PALACE) is a three-year program that seeks to mature and integrate vision-based guidance and control technologies for the autonomous landing task of VTOL UAVs in both simulation and flight experiments. The first year (FY03) of the program defined the system architecture and demonstrated and validated the core machine vision technologies independently in simulation and flight. The second year (FY04) involves the simulation of a full mission, from take-off to landing, using realistic vehicle dynamics and controls, as well as a mission manager to coordinate the work of the vision technologies. The development, testing and evaluation of the integrated simulation in the second year of the PALACE program is the focus of this presentation. The third year (FY05) involves transitioning from the simulation environment to flight evaluations and demonstrations of landing of a rotorcraft UAV in a non-cooperative and cluttered environment without the aid of GPS.