The system consists in a ground station and an air vehicle.
The ground station
Before the flight, it is used to prepare and download a flight
plan in the aircraft. During the flight, it allows monitoring and
recording of flight parameters, video stream, sensors data, as well as
interactions like manual and assisted control, parameters setting and
flight plan reconfiguration.
After the flight, recorded data can be plotted and replayed.
Last but not least, the ground station allows to adapt the software to
different airframes and to simulate (hardware in the loop and full
software) the result.
The aircraft
We use small ready build electric powered commercial airframes. The total
added weight over a standard radio control setup is less than 50g. It
consists in a custom controller board, a video camera and its
transmitter, a GPS receiver and an infrared sensor.
The aircraft is able to perform autonomous takeoff
( hand-launch or bungee ), accurately follow a flight plan and even do
some sort of rough landing. At any time it is switchable to manual or
assisted control, for example to increase landing precision.
Applications
We can imagine thousands applications for MAVs and the biggest limit
stays in airspace regulations. Due to its low cost and source availability,
we think Paparazzi is well suited for the following applications :
- Universities:
- As a tool to learn and experiment in all fields
involved in a MAV (electronics, computer science, flight dynamic,
propulsion etc...)
- As a way of providing data for numerous
other fields (meteo, environment, archaeology etc..)
- Modelers:
- As a tool to improve security, thanx to intelligent failsafe and
airborne data monitoring.
- As a way to improve aircrafts efficiency, by allowing flight
parameters analysis and assisted control mode.
- Humanitarians: