Athena Technologies Inc. (Athena) proposes to develop an affordable, lightweight, and low power INS/GPS integrated flight control system (FCS), hereafter referred to as micro-FCS, capable of guidance, navigation, and control of expendable unmanned air vehicles (UAVs). The proposed approach leverages Athena's expertise in design, fabrication, and operational qualification of our miniaturized GuideStar flight control hardware and our patented and flight-demonstrated Feedback LTI'zation control algorithms. Unlike conventional gain scheduling techniques that require design and testing of tens or hundreds of control design points and switching among each, Feedback LTI'zation uniquely achieves this with the design of only a few design points, valid and stable over the entire flight envelope. This design formulation elegantly produces robust and very small footprint control algorithms, resulting in efficient software maintenance, moderate computational requirements, and overall reduction in software life cycle costs. We believe Athena's expertise in highly-integrated hardware design, combined with the elegance of our flight control algorithms, affords a powerful and innovative solution in producing a new generation of miniaturized and very affordable advanced avionics applicable to a myriad of expendable UAV systems.
Benefits: The future global commercial potential for the micro-FCS in the model airplane market will be enormous, and will allow a larger group of people, with little or no training, the ability to fly hard to fly airplanes and helicopters. Further, small, man-portable, and expendable air vehicles will have a significant role in future reconnaissance operations for military and many law enforcement agencies.
Keywords: Low Cost Avionics, Miniaturized Avionics , INS/GPS, UAV
