Low cost air data system for uav in-flight experimentation

L. Garbarino, Italian Aerospace Research Centre, CIRA, Capua (CE) Italy
N. Genito, Italian Aerospace Research Centre, CIRA, Capua (CE) Italy
V. Baraniello, Italian Aerospace Research Centre, CIRA, Capua (CE) Italy
E. De Lellis, Italian Aerospace Research Centre, CIRA, Capua (CE) Italy
A. Vitale, Italian Aerospace Research Centre, CIRA, Capua (CE) Italy

Abstract

The Italian Aerospace Research Centre is carrying out a national research project, named TECVOL, which aims at developing relevant technologies for fully autonomous flight of fixed wing unmanned aerial vehicles, from take-off to landing, including mid-air flight and collision avoidance functionalities. Such technologies are tested in flight by means of an experimental set-up constituted by a flying platform, named FLARE, and a Ground Control Station. The FLARE vehicle is equipped with an avionic system able to put in operation the algorithms developed in the project, whereas the ground control station is dedicated to supervision and on-line setting of the in-flight experiments. All the components of the equipment are Commercial-Off-The-Shelf elements.

This paper presents the design, development, integration and testing of a low cost air data system, developed to provide accurate and reliable data to the flight control system during the critical flight phases of take-off and landing. Commercial air data systems are generally designed to provide cockpit information and not to be enslaved to a flight control system, therefore they are not able to fit the requirements of TECVOL project. This reason motivates the need for the development of a custom air data system. The paper presents the algorithms implemented to compute air data and to perform model based self-diagnostic, the architecture of the air data system and its integration into the flying platform. The testing process is carried out both in laboratory and in-flight in order to validate the algorithms, evaluate the performance and accomplish the calibration of the system. The effectiveness of the proposed air data system is demonstrated showing its performance during an UAV autonomous mission.