UAV learns to think for itself - now technology will transition to military

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are one step closer to someday matching, and possibly surpassing, their human-piloted counterparts, thanks to the successful completion of a project at Georgia Tech. The project showed that Gatech's GT Max rotary wing UAV is able to learn as it flies, manoeuvre aggressively and automatically plan a route through obstacles thanks to its Open Control Platform system. Researchers from several partner institutions and organizations have helped to successfully build, test and fly GTMax, with capabilities of flight control fault identification and reconfiguration, adaptive control and agile manoeuvring - all operating on a single vehicle and under a single software architecture.

The GTMAX is a UAV helicopter test bed based on the Yamaha RMAX helicopter, and includes a modular open systems avionics package along with the Open Control Platform (OCP).

Read the full story of the development of the RMAX, the world's most advanced commercial UAV here.

The GTMax flight represents the completion of the project to develop an innovative new software-enabled control (SEC) system with applications to UAVs. Based on this UAV success, Georgia Tech has now been awarded funding for two follow-on programs for multiple UAVs in an urban warfare environment and for transitioning the technologies developed under the DARPA/Air Force program to military vehicles.

Collaborators on the project include Draper Laboratories, Vanderbilt University, Scientific Systems Company Inc., Oregon Graduate Institute, Honeywell Laboratories and Boeing.

Advances in rotary wing UAVs are particularly important because of their requirement to take off and land in difficult terrain and restricted-size areas, such as ship decks, and their ability to hover while they identify and inspect specific locations. With traditional aircraft, a pilot with years of training and flight experience is on board to react to problems, threats and weather conditions, and current UAVs must be flown much more conservatively and have limited reaction capabilities.

Georgia Tech's primary contribution to the overall project was continuing work started by Boeing on the new SEC system, an Open Control Platform (OCP), which gives the UAV the ability to reconfigure its software systems autonomously in flight.

The OCP is an object-oriented, real-time operating software architecture that can handle very large sets of data and computations in real time, similar to a pilot's brain reacting to enemy fire or changing weather conditions.

The system also gives the UAV more agility to help avoid danger without exceeding critical flight parameters.

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