Development of a flight test system for unmanned air vehicles

In this paper, an integrated system for the design, development, and testing of guidance, navigation, and control algorithms for unmanned air vehicles was presented. Extensive use was made of commercial off-the-shelf hardware. This kept costs relatively low and made the system easily scaleable. Sophisticated autocode tools allowed a two man team to write, test, and maintain thousands of lines of error-free real time code. In a single unified environment, the avionics system was designed, simulated, and tested incorporating hardware-in-the-loop and used to control an aircraft in flight. Results of application to a rapid flight test prototyping system (RFTPS) for a prototype unmanned aircraft named Frog are presented