Development and applications of a rapid flight test prototyping system for unmanned air vehicles

This paper describes the development of a rapid prototyping system for flight testing of guidance, navigation and control algorithms for unmanned air vehicles. The system affords a small team the ability to rapidly prototype new theoretical concepts and flight test their performance in realistic mission scenarios. The paper describes the software and hardware tools adopted for system development and discusses their application to the proof of concept flight test demonstration of a new integrated guidance and control algorithm for the Frog UAV