Missouri S&T AESS UAV Team

We had our first few autonomous flights two weeks ago, and the UAV didn’t crash, unlike another airplane that day. We got out to the RC field in the early afternoon and it started to rain, it rained on and off all afternoon, so we were only able to fly for short periods of time in between the rain. There were also several other planes out at the field that day, including one of the senior project airplanes built entirely out of carbon fiber.

Unfortunately that airplane was extremely hard to control and on it’s first flight it crashed shortly after takeoff, shearing some nylon bolts. After replacements arrived, it took off again and the second flight lasted much longer, approximately five minutes, before the pilot lost control and it plummeted into the ground. Just as a note, the pilot was a quite experienced, and still had quite a bit of trouble controlling it. Now for the carnage…

As you can see, not much was left of that…

Thankfully our flights did not end like that. Once the runways were clear we prepared for our first autonomous navigation with the autopilot. I created a simple path in the shape of a rectangle for the UAV to fly over the RC field. The UAV took off under manual control and once it was in the air control was handed over to the autopilot. The first time it flew in autonomous navigation mode, the path that the UAV took was rather sloppy, and not very close to the waypoints that were specified. After giving a quick call to Procerus and adjusting a few parameters it flew much better and closer to the path designated. It was quite the sight seeing the UAV fly itself, a little scary at times, but also very impressive.

After flying a few simple paths and loiters, we attempted to use the autonomous landing mode of the Kestrel autopilot. The UAV began to circle down to the proper altitude and once it reached the altitude where it was supposed to come in for the landing approach, for lack of better words, it simply wandered off into the distance and we were forced to take manual control and bring it back. After a few attempts at it, all resulting in the same behavior, we decided to give up and just send the telemtry log back to Procerus to see if they can diagnose the problem.

In this picture you can see the pitot tube to measure airspeed on the wing.

That weekend we went out flying again on Sunday and attempted our first autonomous takeoff, which worked quite well the first time. Once again we attempted some autonomous navigation, this time going farther from the home location (over 1.5 kilometers or ~1 mile). Several times during those flights we had to bring the UAV back under manual control since there was real air traffic to the nearby airport and we did not want to interfere. I will be posting video of our first autonomous flight soon, as well as an update on our electrical system soon.