Development of an unmanned autonomous flying wing for aerial observations

The unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are the aircraft without a human operator on board. Since operators can control the aircraft without some danger, they are useful as an emergency aerial observation method. In this paper, as one of these UAVs, we focus on the flying wing which is a fixed-wing aircraft. In general, the fixed-wing-type UAV can fly longer time than the helicopter-type one because the lift force is produced by rotation of propeller only. However, since the flying speed is very fast in order to produce lift force, it is difficult to take the stationary picture for the observation. Therefore, we have developed the flying wing which can fly slowly at a small field. Moreover, in order to realize the autonomous flight, we have proposed a target point follow-up control method. Then, the effectiveness of the proposed flying wing is explained by experimental results.