An autonomous mini flying saucer have become a great interest in the past decade. Association of Unmanned Vehicle System Internation(AUVSI) has been promoting the idea of an aerial vehicle that can be programmed to perform a mission. AUVSI created an International Aerial Robotic Competition(IARC) to provide a reason for the state-of-the art in aerial robotics to move forward. Challenges set before the international collegiate community have been geared towards producing advances in the state-of-the-art at an increasingly aggressive pace.

Virginia Tech Autonomous Aerial Vehicle Team 2010 (AAVT'10) is a group of student assembled to answer this challenge. The team will participates in 6th International Aerical Robotic Competition (IARC), which will take place at The University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez on August 2010.

The team heads by Dr. Kevin Kochersberger, director of Unmanned System Lab(USL) at Virginia Tech, and consists of eight senior students and two graduate students. The team is divided into 3 differrent groups: Mechanical, Sensor and Navigation, and Vision that work together to create a robust system capable of finishing the task specified for IARC's 6th mission.

Mechanical Team

The Autonomous Aerial Vehicle is intended for flight into and through a building. The vehicle is expected to navigate through the building without colliding with any obstacles. To accomplish the mission the vehicle must be both small and agile. In addition to maintaining controlled flight, the craft must also be below a maximum weight limit of 1500 g. The structure of the vehicle must be rigid and lightweight in order to accommodate the hardware required to complete the mission without exceeding the predetermined weight limit.

In order to maintain autonomous flight the vehicle needs onboard control systems that constantly feed off information regarding pitch, roll and yaw. This will be equated to an appropriate amount of power to each thruster to maintain stable flight. The architecture of the controller designed to stabilize flight is intended to be robust in order to maintain flight control with little time delay. The vehicle is required to acquire a small USB flash drive, and replace that flash drive with a decoy. The frame of the vehicle must be able to support a device designed to interact with the environment as well as with the flash drives.

Navigational Team

The overall mission of this team is to provide vehicle mapping capabilities and navigational references in order to obtain stable and intelligent vehicle flight. This overall mission for the navigational team shall be achieved by meeting defining goals and objectives that will determine the progression for this team. The objectives are to:

1. Develop an understanding of what requirements this team will meet, and the expectations that the vehicle has from our data and calculation outputs.
2. Research current platforms and implementations for other systems that provide mapping and localization in a dead-reckoning environment.
3. Evaluate concepts and develop test case scenarios that best evaluate a systems capability to develop a map and use potential onboard processing from the vehicle.
4. Develop and refine vehicle mapping and localization that will be coupled with IMU data.
5. Continuously evaluate and refine vehicle mapping techniques through the implementation and development of algorithms and filters.

Vision Team

The entire autonomous system has a high level of integration among its controller, navigation, mechanical, and vision systems. For the computer vision system’s highly layered functionality, many objectives are dependent on the communication and adhesion with the overall system objectives.

Typical vision systems are designed to recognize predetermined patterns based on the objectives specified by the designer. The overall objective in the design of the vision system is to achieve reliability and effectiveness. The system being developed for the autonomous aerial vehicle has five major objectives: identify a chief of security sign and its indicated direction, recognize a flash drive and relative position to the centroid of the vehicle, identify an LED light and it’s on/off status, recognize a laser grid shut-off button and its relative position, and localize a flash drive search area and communicate the relative position to the controller.

To achieve each primary objective, the vision system is required to have a method of visual mobility, an algorithm for automated pattern recognition, and the appropriate sensors to probe the environment for analysis. The fulfillment of each objective is dependentupon the controller accuracy, the navigation precision and accuracy, the mechanical stability of the vehicle, and the communication between each integrated system.