M-Fly AUVSI-SUAS Autonomous Unmanned Vehicle Hardware System

Abstract

The M-Fly student project team is a multidisciplinary organization whose mission is to design, build, and compete aircraft. M-Fly builds several planes from scratch each year which are submitted to multiple competitions. One of these planes, the Michigan Autonomous (MAT) system, is an autonomous, unmanned system which is submitted to the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International – Student Unmanned Aerial Systems (AUVSI-SUAS) competition. The yearly competition specification outlines several mission goals that M-Fly’s MAT system must attempt. Among these for the 2020 competition were autonomous flight; object detection, localization, and classification (ODLC) with imaging; autonomous waypoint navigation; and autonomous detection and avoidance of other aircraft. In 2020, the competition also specified an additional mission goal involving a payload drop of an autonomous ground vehicle that had even more tasks itself. Though still a new competition and system for M-Fly, the third iteration of the MAT platform, the MAT-3, presented a novel design based on the lessons learned from the first two iterations. This report details the design of the system electronics architecture, evaluates the success of the system, and makes recommendations for further tests and development.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/167247/1/HonorsCapstoneFinalReport-Matthew_French.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/167247/2/HonorsCapstoneFinalPresentation-Matthew_French.pd