Development of the rapid flight test prototyping system for unmanned air vehicles

This paper describes the development of a rapid prototyping system for flight testing of guidance, navigation, and control algorithms for unmanned air vehicles. The system affords a small team the ability to take a new concept in guidance, navigation, and control from initial conception to flight test. In order to do this, a number of engineering problems had to be overcome addressing a gamut of issues including weight, power, portability, risk, electronic interference, vibration, manpower, etc. The main contribution of the paper is the proof of concept flight test demonstration of a new integrated guidance and control algorithm.