LQG control design for a hovering micro air vehicle using an optical tracking system

The need to conduct warfare in urban environments presents a new frontier for navigation and control of UAV's in locations where GPS may be degraded or denied. This paper addresses the first step in the development of a robust, non-GPS guidance, navigation, and targeting system for small indoor air vehicles: to design and validate a flight control system for micro aerial vehicles using an externally-mounted optical tracking system. The controller is designed using a modified linear quadratic Gaussian (LQG) technique which leverages the unscented Kalman filter (UKF) for state estimation. The controller is evaluated using a combination of simulation and flight test approaches conducted in the Air Force Research Laboratory's Micro Air Vehicle (MAV) Indoor Flight Facility. The results of the flight testing will be used to optimize the control design, which will pave the way for future research efforts, including incorporation of automated image processing techniques for vehicle stabilization.