Frontiers of Engineering Reports on Leading-Edge Engineering from the 2001 NAE Symposium on Frontiers of Engineering (2002) / Chapter Skim
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Miniature Spy Planes: The Next Generation of Flying Robots
Miniature Spy Planes: The Next Generation of Flying Robots
Pages 10-20
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From page 10... ...
MORRIS MLB Company Palo Alto, California INTRODUCTION Affordable airborne access to information has been on the wish list of the military, businesses, and individuals for a long time, but nearly 100 years after the Wright brothers' flight at Kitty Hawk this dream has not yet come true. Anyone who wants to check out events on the ground at a particular moment still needs a full-size airplane or helicopter, a pilot's license, and a nearby airfield.
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In the Vietnam War, drones built by Teledyne Ryan flew regular reconnaissance missions gathering valuable photographic data under autonomous flight control. The Israeli airforce pioneered the use of smaller, low-cost drones for reconnaissance and decoy missions.
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The Lockheed-Sanders MicroStar MAV has a 12-inch wingspan, uses electric propulsion, and is capable of autonomous flight with GPS navigation. Both MAVs carry color cameras and use lithium batteries for propulsion.
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The sensor package is a 3-axis gimbal mount with two video cameras, each with a different field of view lens that can be switched in flight for closer views of desired areas. The gimballed camera is inertially stabilized using the flight
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FIGURE 4 Bat by MLB. Source: Stephen Morris, MLB Company, Palo Alto, California.
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with wings folded to 4-foot size. Source: Stephen Morris, MLB Company, Palo Alto, California.
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Once the aircraft is launched, it follows the course defined by the way-points at the speed and altitude specified for each leg of the course. Bat has been used in research projects on wildlife habitat to provide image mosaics of wetland areas and to deploy a miniature sensor network that transported data back to a remote ground station via Bat.
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From page 17... ...
and still perform adequately for their purposes. At a very low Reynolds number, the best strategy for generating lift with low-energy input shifts from smooth, shaped airfoils to rougher wing surfaces and unsteady movement through the fluid.
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If advances in MEMS continue, an entire flight avionics system will soon be available on a single chip. This would greatly reduce the weight and volume of flight avionics, which tend to be a higher percentage of the total as UAV size shrinks.
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From page 19... ...
1 Data Quality Most mini-UAVs carry a fixed camera as the primary image sensor. Flight tests have shown that image quality is degraded by aircraft motion caused by maneuvering or wind gusts.
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From page 20... ...
Current satellite imagery is limited to 10-meter pixel resolution, and images are affected by cloud cover and satellite trajectories. Because mini-UAVs fly at low altitudes, they could supplement satellite image databases with high-resolution imagery collected during periods of cloud cover or whenever desired.
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