UAV Discussions for You
By: Lance Winslow
There are so many flight control systems challenges and problems as scientists and researchers morph UAVs Unmanned Aerial Vehicles into Micro Air Vehicles or MAVs. When discussing these things we must look at some of the more common problems scientists will face; performance obstacles and types for instance how will we power these little tiny MAVs, what type of battery, mini engine, flapping wings? Can we use solar, electromagnetic energy or even beam power to the units themselves? Can they run off vibrational energy?
We also face problems such as flight envelopes and maneuvering for instance what types of sensors can we use, what types of micro sensors, MEMS, tiny operating systems. What about terrain avoidance, flying in tunnels, around bushes and over cars? What about Surveillance performance and communication time delays of tele-robotics or feeding of instructions, will they be fully autonomous or semi autonomous? The transmitters and receivers take up space and weight, but they must be micro in size and weight, as payload and performance cannot be sacrificed.
I have some issues which have not been addressed on Mini-MAVs, which are problematic using optical flow sensors, terrain following, flying thru fan blades, tree branches, door ways, halls, caves, between buildings, tunnels, etc which I have been researching and others are also concerned about these things as well. Anyone who is designing micro air vehicles should be thinking here as the robotics industry goes to a micro, even nano scale in the future. Think on this.
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