Development of control platform for micro-UAVs with integrated motion planning in wind

Abstract

Micro-UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) attract much interest in a wide range of commercial applications. Due to small size, very limited power and susceptibility to wind their design poses difficult problems in control and motion planning. FPGA technology allows integration of high speed control circuits with efficient hardware implementations of complex algorithms on the same reconfigurable hardware chip. This is a very attractive option for implementation of a micro-UAV computing platform. This paper presents development of control platform for micro-UAVs focusing on integration of lower level control with online motion planning in wind. Some aspects of tight integration of on-board optical sensors with the aircraft control system are also discussed.