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The main objective of the Daedalus project is to design and flight test advanced control and coordination techniques for Unmanned Air Vehicle Systems (UAS) with applications in environmental and surveillance applications.
The control and computation literature is rich in advanced control and coordination techniques for UAS. Few of these techniques are ever transitioned into UAS. Typically, computational simulations are the last development stage for majority of these techniques.
Flight testing and evaluation is typically expensive and involves detailed knowledge of these techniques, as well as of flight operations, vehicles, sensors and on-board computational systems. The mapping of advanced coordination and control techniques into real a UAS creates intricate relations between hardware and software which generate rich behaviors that are difficult to model mathematically.
However, predictable behavior and guaranteed performance are one of the main obstacles in the path to the certification of UAS for operation in non-segregated air space. This is especially important in trajectory optimization, obstacle avoidance and coordinated control, three of thrusts of the project.