Journal of Aeronautics & Aerospace Engineering
Open Access

Abstract

A Platform for Autonomous Path Control of Unmanned Airship

Constantino Gonçalves Ribeiro, Luciano Raptopoulos and Max Suell Dutra

The applications of UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) are growing up and becoming part of many daily tasks in many organizations. But as matter of fact, the use of a UAV does not mean the decreasing of operational complexities and, consequently, the costs of perform its tasks. Sometimes this high cost is connected to the dependence of welltrained operators and huge remote control facilities to operate a sophisticated UAV’s. This paper proposes an UAV that can perform its tasks as much independent of human interaction as possible, and with a minimum connection to its mission control facilities. This independence will be achieved by embedding the mission control into the UAV. As the mission control is embedded, the UAV will have less connections issues with its control center and will be less dependable of human interaction. Prove this concept all kinematics and dynamics of a light than air vehicle (blimp) is develop; a prototype of an embedded parallel distributed compute was constructed; and new procedures to resolve navigations and collision evasions issues are proposed. The new evasion procedures were implemented into a simulator and a new parallel/distributed program for optimal path discover was developed to be used into the cluster prototype. All tests of the evasion procedures simulator were satisfactory and the speed up tests using the embedded cluster showed the better performance of the proposed framework.