The Flight Control System Laboratory at West Virginia University is actively engaged with the development, flight testing, and research of unmanned aerial vehicles. Multiple research topics are approached: aircraft modeling and design, sensor fusion, fault tolerant multi-sensor fusion, control strategy formulation, and testing for fault tolerant flight. This paper presents the new addition of a ground control system which is able to communicate with the onboard flight control system in real time. This system is capable of modifying the flight conditions and the control actions. A research pilot can fly the aircraft through the ground control station taking advantage of a synthetic view with Heads-Up Display containing downlink information from the aircraft showing all parameters of interest. A detailed hardware and software description is provided along with the current testbed capabilities. Testing procedures and results are presented followed by a discussion of future testing and research plans.
展开▼
