Bulletin

Issue: July 2006

News

New use for technology in unmanned aircraft

'Messing around' with a model aeroplane might seem like a pastime of marginal importance for bright young technology students.

The work of these two students will be
on display on Open Day at La Trobe's
Melbourne (Bundoora) campus,
Sunday 27 August.

But two such students at La Trobe University are using their skills to control the operations of model aeroplanes to forward the efficiency of one of the world's fastest growing aeronautical industries - autonomous unmanned aircraft.

The work of Robert Ross, right, and Wade Tregaskis has been described by their supervisor, Associate Professor John Devlin, as a 'novel implementation in the latest microelectronic devices'. The project is co-supervised by Mr Paul Main, a lecturer in Electronic Engineering.

The new 500 gram device developed by the students, while fitted to an unmanned aircraft only 50 cm long, can be applied to unmanned aircraft of any size.

Dr Devlin says Robert's and Wade's advanced technology is a tiny step forward in improving the rapidly growing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) industry, estimated to be worth $8 billion world-wide by 2008, and hundreds of millions of dollars annually in Australia.

Calling their new device an AE Robotics E1 prototype, the students used a commercially purchased model remote control aeroplane as its base.

The two, both fifth-year Bachelor of Computer Science/Bachelor of Electronic Engineering students, designed an embedded system using the latest microelectronic devices that takes a step further the efficiency of an unmanned plane's performance.

Their microchip is placed between the aircraft's radio control device and its normal controls, enabling the plane to be placed into fully automatic mode.

The students used a PC to develop the pre-flight plan using their own software to build and download a flight database to an embedded microcontroller on the plane.

The embedded device uses GPS navigation as its point of reference and primary navigation system. It also incorporates Micro-Electro- Mechanical Systems devices, to provide three-dimensional magnetometers and accelerometers to augment the GPS, which is not particularly accurate at low speeds. The device also records flight information and photographs on a small memory card.

Dr Devlin said that currently the uses of UAVs were 90 per cent military and 10 per cent commercial, but the proportion was changing rapidly and UAVs were being used more and more for civil uses including meteorology - currently the largest nonmilitary use - but also for traffic control, crop assessment, and wildlife conservation.

'That two of our students can make technological advances like this shows the value of the multi-skilling that a double degree program gives,' says Dr Devlin.

'The electronic skills of Electronic Engineering were used to design the embedded system, and the programming skills which give the device its functionality come from the Computer Science side of their studies.'