Grant: Research Tools and Instruments - Category 1 (<$150,000)

The objective of this proposal is to build up a state-of-the-art cooperative and fault-tolerant control system testing platform with a set of three fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and a set of three unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) to support Applicant's current discovery project ""Development and validation of fault-tolerant and cooperative guidance, navigation and control techniques with unmanned systems"". Since the safety and cost issues associated with manned aerial vehicles such as Airbus 380, Boeing 747, UAVs become a practical and affordable test-bed for developing and evaluating advanced fault-tolerant control laws. UAVs also open the door for more practical applications to forest fires, pipelines, lakes and natural resources survellience etc using multiple low-cost UAVs/UGVs. Therefore, such a testing platform has mutiple functions and important role towards achieving and extending the goals of the Applicant's current discovery project. The proposed platform will be built to evaluate different autonomous/fault-tolerant, and cooperative flight control algorithms developed through our theoretical research under practical flight testing conditions with different types of internal faults and external disturbances in realistic flight conditions, and for forest fires and other survellience and detection applications. For testing and implementing cooperative and fault-tolerant control concepts and techniques, redundant control surfaces and associated actuation systems will be introduced in the testing platform. The developed platform will be opened to the other researchers from Concordia University and other institutes in the future. It will also serve for an excellent experimental test platform for the undergraduate and graduate courses ""flight control systems"" and ""fault diagnosis and fault-tolerant control systems"" that the applicant is currently offering at Concordia. The platform will also create opportunities for future collaborations with other universities, research institutes, and industry. Finally, the platform will be essential for the applicant to carry out the NSERC project to meet the ultimate objective - to transfer the developed cutting-edge technologies to Canadian industries with a competitive edge.