Development of a Small Unmanned Air Vehicle

Recently, the development of Unmanned Air Vehicle (UAV) has been an important activity in Brazilian Aerospace Research Centers and Universities. The major of these enforcements has been focused in the development of medium size UAV's for aerial reconnaissance. Particularly, the CEA-UFMG, start an effort in order to develop a small size UAV (SUAV) able to execute aerial reconnaissance of small areas. This work present the most important phases of the development process of this SUAV. For the construction of computational models for the flight dynamic simulation and the calculation of aerodynamics characteristics of aerial platform several in-house developed codes was used. With these computational tools became possible to design the guidance and automatic control strategies. Initially the strategies were developed for each motion in separated, and finally they are grouped for test ant tune in the 6DOF simulator. Details of embedded hardware and software are presented. Finally, details of aerial platform adaptation are present and a detailed flight test results is showed. This flight test results including: longitudinal automatic control tests; latero directional automatic control tests and full automatic control tests. In the full automatic control flight tests results, several considerations of guidance strategies is presented. With these results, CEA - UFMG became the first Brazilian research center to perform autonomous flight in Brazil with SUAV.