A very low cost UAV platform for education in flight testing

Alberto Rolando, Department of Aerospace Science and Technology, Politecnico di Milano, Italy

Abstract

The Department of Aerospace Science and Technology of the Politecnico di Milano has an consolidated tradition in flight testing education. The present paper presents Chippy, the latest addition to the “Flight Testing” MSc course assets. It is a 640 g maximum take off mass, 1200 mm wingspan, 250 W electrical motor powered, in-house developed unmanned air vehicle. Chippy is conceived to serve as an effective, dependable, very-low-cost platform to provide students with an initial, hands-on flight testing experience, preparatory for the subsequent first person test flight core activity included in the course syllabus. It features a multi-sensor suite (GPS, inertial data, magnetometer, air data, propulsion data, system state), an on-board secure digital memory card-based data recorder and a 802.15.4, 2.4 GHz-based telemetry link to the ground station. Among the more traditional tasks performed by the on board avionics it is worth to be mentioned the electronic flight test system, by means of which it is possible to define at mission planning time a sequence of test points, load them on the electronic flight card subsystem and have the on board test point director, triggered by the pilot on ground, autonomously execute them. Results of the validation flights campaign, performed in second quarter of 2014, are presented.