Autonomous Micro Aerial Vehicle

1. 1. Background information

There are several motivations to successfully design and build an autonomous micro aerial vehicle. The first is that MAVs have a wide range of applications.The most common useofautonomous aerial vehicles today is reconnaissance. It is widely known that the military already employslarge scale Unmanned Autonomous Vehicles (also known as UAVs)to conduct reconnaissance missions and feed important battlefield information across the globe. While this is quite useful, MAVs have a slightly different appeal as they have the capability to be operated by an individual soldier on demand.This, combined with their small size, makes them ideal for providing local reconnaissance for a platoon on a modern battlefield with an urban setting.

Autonomous MAVs also have uses in a non-military setting. Cities and businesses certainly have a need for an autonomously navigating video camera unit. The uses range from simple security camera for the interior of a building to traffic monitoring to border surveillance. Furthermore, multiple MAVs could be used to enhance communications by providing relay points. MAVs have a wide variety of uses in our world, and the development of these platforms is in high demand.

We plan to use our capstone project as an opportunity to try and achieve some of the functions necessary for a fully autonomous surveillance MAV to work: maintaining stable flight and avoiding obstacles in a closed in space. Our project will therefore seek to design a stable aerial platform capable of flying through an indoor hallway while avoiding common obstacles such as walls.

Needless to say, this project fits very well into our country’s position in current world events. As the United States is still involved in urban warfare in Iraq, an autonomous MAV that can be used “on demand” by an individual soldier is extremely applicable. Once this technology is developed, it has the potential to provide life saving information such as what awaits a team of marines just around the corner or inside a suspicious building.

To gain some background information we looked into a lot of different projects that were either currently going on or have already been completed. We will discuss three of those projects in this paper.

The first concept that we looked into was recommended by our instructor, Prof Piper, because it was done at the United States Naval Academy and closely related to our own idea. A low cost fully autonomous micro aerial vehicle (Fig. 1), completed in 2005, was a very good projected done by midshipmen, with reasonable goals.