Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Research Lab (UAVRL)

Description of Research:

Directed by Prof. M. S. Selig. The Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Research Lab (UAVRL) operates a variety of unmanned aircraft used to perform research in several areas. There are two fully-instrumented large-scale aerobatic aircraft, a 35% scale Extra 260 and a 35% scale Sukhoi 29S, which are used to collect flight state data for aerodynamics research in the full flight regime, including at high angles of attack and in upset scenarios. The lab also has a high-wing trainer-type aircraft used to test and calibrate new avionic systems and sensors. The UAVRL operates a pair of 22% scale Cessna 182 Skylane aircraft and a small electric helicopter for research in real-time tasks in embedded systems, which include multicore task performance optimization, flight envelope protection, and security reinforcement of networked embedded devices such as autopilots, all done in collaboration with Prof. M. Caccamo of the Real Time Systems Laboratory in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science. A third Cessna 182 aircraft is used for ground testing and hardware-in-the-loop simulation. With the use of an indoor 8-node Vicon motion tracking system, shared with the Aerospace Robotics and Control Research Lab, research on several micro air vehicles (MAVs) is being conducted in order to explore aerodynamic characteristics of aircraft at low Reynolds numbers.