A Rapid Control Prototyping Laboratory for UVS presented at Unmanned Systems Canada Conference

On November 2 - 5, 2010 Unmanned Systems Canada will be holding its 8th internationally renowned Annual Conference in Montreal, Quebec, to present Canadian and international innovations in the field of unmanned vehicle systems (UVS) technologies.

Unmanned Vehicle Systems are growing in popularity across a broad spectrum of applications including military, search and rescue, environmental, and others. Likewise, UVS research is growing and there is an increasing demand for hardware platforms on which to test UVS algorithms and controllers. At the Unmanned Systems Canada Conference, a Quanser engineer will present a paper on the fully-integrated, indoor UVS laboratory. In his paper, titled "A Rapid Control Prototyping Laboratory for UVS", Cameron Fulford, Manager for Systems & Control will explain how this extensible and flexible research platform can be used for a variety of UVS research topics including collaborative control, flight dynamics and control, fault detection and redundancy management, vehicle guidance and navigation, formation control, obstacle avoidance, autonomous and supervisory control, and sensor filtering and fusion. Cameron will also present a complete hardware and software description of the UVS laboratory, along with experimental results of fully autonomous UAV and UGV experiments.

The UVS lab consists of one or more unmanned vehicles including open-architecture quadrotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs), a camera-based localization system, a ground station PC, and real-time control software integrated with MATLAB™ Simulink. Each unmanned vehicle contains a small-scale embedded computer with wireless communications and data acquisition board (DAQ) capable of hosting autonomous control algorithms. All vehicle controllers are designed using MATLAB™ Simulink on the ground station PC, which are then downloaded wirelessly and executed remotely on-board the vehicles once launched. Users can monitor and record sensor/vehicle feedback and update controller commands and parameters on-the-fly via the ground station.

Join us on Friday, November 5, 2010 at 11 AM at Fairmont Queen Elizabeth Hotel and Convention Centre in Montreal, Canada. Please contact us at info@quanser.com for more details.