Grant: Engage Grants Program

Multi-rotor UAVs are finding their way into commercial use due to their ability to hover in place with applications in: inspecting infrastructure, monitoring purposes, and surveillance. Their safety is paramount as a result of their omni-presence in our everyday life. Extra safety measures need to be embedded in their autopilot to avoid crashing into people and/or sensitive infrastructure such as power towers and buildings. The focus of this research is to develop add-on features for MicroPilot's autopilots for controlled crash landing in case of rotor failures in Quadcopter UAVs. MicroPilot, an all-Canadian company located in Winnipeg, Manitoba, is a complete solution provider in the UAV industry. Incorporated in 1994, MicroPilot has over 850 clients as a world leader in developing autopilots for UAVs and MAVs. They offer a family of lightweight autopilots that fly fixed- and rotary-wing UAVs with autonomous operation from launch to recovery. Included with MicroPilot's autopilot packages is flight control simulation systems called TrueHWIL and XTENDER, and HORIZON Ground Control Station (GCS) software, which offers a user-friendly, point-and-click interface for mission planning, parameter adjustment, flight monitoring, and mission simulation. A current direction MicroPilot is taking is to add a flight control strategy into their autopilots for multi-rotor UAVs in case of rotor failure. The most-widely used configurations in multi-rotor UAVs, namely Qaudcopters can maintain reduced attitude equilibrium in case of single rotor failure. However, for multiple-rotor failure cases, a crash is inevitable in which case some precise flight maneuvers can lead to crash landing them away from sensitive areas. This remains a very practical yet novel research area as the focal point of this project.