Motion tracking to test performance and maintenance for future intelligent airborne fleet

Citation

(2007), "Motion tracking to test performance and maintenance for future intelligent airborne fleet", Aircraft Engineering and Aerospace Technology, Vol. 79 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/aeat.2007.12779caf.005

Motion tracking to test performance and maintenance for future intelligent airborne fleet

Motion tracking to test performance and maintenance for future intelligent airborne fleet

Vicon, Developer of Academy Award- winning motion capture systems, and a Division of Oxford Metrics Group, announced that the company's technology is being used in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) studies, an important developing arena in the field of aeronautical engineering.

UAVs are already deployed to perform a variety of tasks in the place of manned vehicles and planes. Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and The Boeing Company's Phantom Works advanced research and development group are using Vicon to examine and demonstrate algorithms needed to sustain and maintain co-ordinated flights and missions by an intelligent multi-unit airborne fleet.

Currently, 18 Vicon cameras are providing high-speed, high-resolution motion tracking for the project, which is being conducted with miniature quadrotors in MIT's aerospace controls lab. This indoor flight testbed uses the real-time 3D position and orientation data captured by the Vicon cameras to help stabilise and control the vehicles during flight operations.

“Here in the lab, we are using Vicon to understand how you can get fully autonomous vehicles to work together and to evaluate what is needed to maintain health and maintenance for these vehicles on co-ordinated and sustained real-world missions in the field” said Jonathan How, Aeronautics and Astronautics Professor at MIT. “The Vicon system was chosen because the project needs a tracking system that works indoors and provides accurate and detailed measurements, such as altitude and pitch, in real time.”

The real-time performance of the Vicon system has been essential because the 3D capture data is not analysed later but used literally on the fly. The MIT team says that an extremely important property of the sensor system is that it demonstrates a high level of robustness.

“Using the Vicon system, we can accurately determine and track the location and orientation of each UAV during multi-vehicle experiments” said Mario Valenti, MIT.

The lab also benefits from rapid prototyping using Vicon, with the ability to run many trials from the same set-up to try out a variety of ideas. “We can fly our aircraft a thousand times over if we want – the sky really is the limit!” Valenti said.