Autonomous Pursuit with Micro-Fixed-Wing Aircraft

This project aims to design controllers for micro fixed-wing aircraft using feedback controllers in order to achieve autonomous pursuit of a moving target.  We use a motion capture environment in the lab for real-time position and orientation feedback.  We a have experimentally designed a feedback control architecture, and experimentally determined appropriate control gains, to control the aircraft to pursue the target.  We assume no prior knowledge of the dynamics of either the aircraft or the target.  We decompose the aircraft into its lateral (left-right) and longitudinal (up-down) dynamics, and control each separately.  The longitudinal and lateral controllers react on-line to the changing location of a target, driving the aircraft to pursue the target.  The YouTube link below shows a movie of the micro-aircraft pursing a target which is moved by a person in the lab.