| Unmanned Flight with Windows XP Embedded |
by Suzanne Ross (Aug. 5, 2004)
Kids who graduated from balsa wood bi-planes to radio-controlled airplanes will love what's coming around the corner.
Faculty and students at Cornell University have built an unmanned airplane with its own on-board, embedded control system. The large-scale model plane flies by accessing coordinates from an off-the-shelf GPS unit.
"The plane is capable of GPS guided flight, surveillance, and is very modular," said Kevin Kornegay, one of the faculty advisors for the project.
Last year, the group won an Innovation Excellence Award from Microsoft Research to continue their previous work in designing an autopilot system for a large scale model aircraft. Schools around the globe received awards from the Microsoft Research University Relations program to enable them to conduct research in emerging technologies.
"Our previous design represented a very early prototype for an autonomous aircraft. The autopilot system was extremely heavy, it lacked software functionality, but it was a strong version one," said Kornegay.
 This year the system is based on a PC/104 form-factor Windows XP Embedded computer and has a variety of navigational sensors.
"The software is written in C#, and is broken into four large applications. The autopilot software resides on the airplane and allows the plane to fly complete missions without any assistance from the ground. The plane also has wireless modems, which it uses to relay telemetry to the ground, and to allow for updated mission guidelines," explains Kornegay.
The client software is written to display telemetry to the end user, for instance, where the plane is on a map or how fast it is traveling. The group developed two applications, one for a laptop or desktop computer, and one for a Pocket PC. Students monitored the airplane's flight from the Pocket PC application.
The students entered the resulting prototype in the second annual Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems (AUVSI) student competition. In 2003, they placed first in the contest. This year, however, they lost most of their equipment in a fire just before the competition. "We still gave our software demonstration though, allowing us to place 'best of teams that didn't fly," said Kornegay.
The mission for the competition requires the plane to take off manually or autonomously, then autonomously navigate a course with five to ten GPS waypoints while using an onboard video or camera system to locate a series of man-made objects on the ground.
Each team has 30 minutes of flight time to complete their mission. The planes will be judged on time, aircraft cost and weight, navigation accuracy, efficiency, safety and ability to locate the objects.
To test their flight control algorithms, the group used Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004, running the algorithms for hundreds of hours. They used a SIG Rascal aircraft with a 110-inch wingspan. The aircraft is 75 inches long and weighs thirteen pounds.
The students modified the vehicle for unmanned flight by replacing the factory tail with a custom lifting tail, which moved the center of gravity further towards the rear of the plane. They also installed large in-wing flaps because the wings on the airframe had a heavier than designed for load. The in-wing flaps allowed a slower stall speed and improved takeoff and landings.
The system runs off a pair of 512 MB CompactFlash cards, which provides a storage system with no moving parts able to withstand up to 10,000 Gs. One CompactFlash card holds the operating system in a protected write mode, while the other stores a real-time flight log -- a "black box" that can be examined to diagnose problems, even if the vehicle crashes.
The plane's electronics and sensors payload
(Click image for larger view)
Summary of project specifications:
- Uses onboard Technoland PC/104-Plus single-board computer
- Based on an 800MHz Transmeta Crusoe processor
- USB-to-serial device provides 4 additional RS232 communication ports
- Runs Microsoft's Windows XP Embedded operating system
Members of the Cornell student team:
- Karl Schulze
- Andrew Abramson
- Brian Rogan
- Ron Hose
- Jonathon Kron
- Aaron Kimball
- Joe Sullivan
- Will Aber
Copyright © 2003-2004 Microsoft Corp. All rights reserved. This article was initially published on the Microsoft Research website. Reproduced by WindowsForDevices.com with permission.
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