An Autonomous Autopilot Control System Design for Small-Scale UAVs

This paper describes the design and implementation of a fully autonomous and programmable autopilot system for small scale autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) aircraft. This system was implemented in Reflection and has flown on the Exploration Aerial Vehicle (EAV) platform at NASA Ames Research Center, currently only as a safety backup for an experimental autopilot. The EAV and ground station are built on a component-based architecture called the Reflection Architecture. The Reflection Architecture is a prototype for a real-time embedded plug-and-play avionics system architecture which provides a transport layer for real-time communications between hardware and software components, allowing each component to focus solely on its implementation. The autopilot module described here, although developed in Reflection, contains no design elements dependent on this architecture.