Proceedings of Two Day Ukieri Workshop on Unmanned Aircraft Systems Technologies

Abstract

A two day workshop on „Unmanned Aircraft Systems Technologies. was organized by the Multi Sensor Data Fusion group, Flight Mechanics and Control Division (FMCD) at Hotel Matthan, HAL Airport Road on 8th and 9th December 2011. The fourth UKIERI (UK - India Education and Research Initiative) workshop was hosted by NAL, one of the four Indian partners of a major award project funded by the UK and Indian governments. The UKIERI program was started in April 2006 with the aim of enhancing educational links between India and the UK. In the year 2007, the group of institutions consisting of CSIR-NAL Bangalore, Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay, National Institute of Technology (NIT) Trichy on the Indian side and the University of Leicester, Leicester, UK were among the first six to win a major award under this programme for their joint proposal entitled "Towards Reliable and smart Air vehicles". In his welcome address at the inaugural session, Mr. Shyam Chetty, Officiating Director,NAL acknowledged the immense contribution made by Prof Ian Postlethwaite towards the UKIERI project. He mentioned that the final workshop organised by NAL is aimed at sharing the progress of the project and providing a platform to share expertise and knowledge in research, development and technologies in the vibrant and exciting area of autonomous unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) in India and UK. He reiterated that the partnerships which have been forged between the two countries should be nurtured further to make it stronger. Dr (Mrs) Girija Gopalratnam, Deputy Head, FMCD in her inaugural address described the work carried out at FMCD, NAL on application of Artificial Intelligence techniques for fault tolerant control. Enhanced Synthetic Vision System for ground operator situation awareness and system identification for UAV flight data were additional technologies that were included and pursued under the UKIERI project. She mentioned that the activities described in the original work plan have been followed closely with each partner taking a lead in certain tasks. The progress has been discussed and presented at three workshops held earlier at IISc, NITT and IIT Bombay. Prof Ian Postelthwaite, Deputy Vice Chancellor, Northumbria University, UK in his inaugural remarks described the work carried out by each of the five partners. The IISc team, led by Prof Sitarama Bhat has made contributions in three main areas, namely, the design and construction of an instrumented light-weight long-endurance mini UAV capable of autonomous trajectory planning in cluttered environments, design of control laws for the automatic landing of UAVs and coordination problems in multi-vehicle systems. The IIT Bombay team led by Professor Bandyopadhyay has worked on sliding mode control for UAVs using fast output sampling. The NITT team led by Prof Ramakalyan has developed UAV path planning algorithms working closely with research staff at IISc. The Leicester research activities of Professors Postlethwaite, Gu and Edwards have been aimed at increasing the levels of autonomy that can be achieved in UAVs using methods and algorithms for flight path planning, mission planning and task assignment for single and multi-vehicle systems. A common theme in all of the above has been the need for real-time implementation in the presence of uncertainties arising from unpredictable operating environments. Lt. Gen (Dr.) V.J. Sundaram, PVSM, AVSM, VSM (Retd.) Advisor, Micro and Nano Systems, National Design and Research Forum who has spearheaded the Unmanned Aircraft programs in India was the keynote speaker. In his keynote address, which was titled, MICRO / NANO / BIO AIR VEHICLES – INDIA, Gen Sundaram covered in detail the developments in India and the research areas that need to be pursued for future developments. The Research areas include low Reynolds number aerodynamics, light weight composite structures, robust control with vision and GPS based navigation and guidance and light weight propulsion. The National Design and Research Forum jointly supported by AR&DB and the Department of Science and Technology, supports R&D in micro and nano air vehicles based on fixed, rotary and flapping wings with special focus on insect flight aerodynamics / mechanics, Cooperative flying, Robust swarm control, Vision based navigation and guidance as well as appropriate sensors. The Two day workshop had four invited talks and twelve paper presentations by the team members from the five organizations. In the concluding session, all the partners expressed that the UKIERI program has established strong relationship between UK and India. Though the current project is over, the research work and the cooperation will continue. The program brought institutions in India to work together and enabled a number of students to pursue and finish their PhD degrees. It was felt that Government funding for future collaborative projects could be explored. In this Special Publication, the summary of the invited talks and the extended abstracts of the papers along with the presentation material are compiled