Massachusetts Institute of Technology

MIT UAV Team

The MIT UAV Team is developing an unmanned reconnaissance aircraft to compete in the AUVSI Student UAV Competition.  The goal of the competition is to fly an autonomous aircraft capable of detecting targets on the ground.  The more autonomous the aircraft, the higher the score a team receives.

My main contribution to the team has been the development of the image capture and management software.  The program receives the live video and telemetry streams from the aircraft and displays them in a user-friendly way.  With the help of the user, targets that come into the field of view are identified and located.  Using a direction cosine matrix and the telemetry information from the aircraft, the position of targets seen by the camera can be determined even if the aircraft is not flying level.  The position of selected targets can also be transmitted over the ground network to the flight management software so that it can be scheduled for a high-resolution picture.

On a more technical side, the program was coded entirely in C#, a high-level language designed by Microsoft and based on C/C++.  C# was chosen because it is a simple language to learn and a lot of functionality is provided through included libraries.  These libraries simplify many programming tasks including TCP/IP communication, serial port communication, and multi-threading.  On a standard laptop or desktop, the overhead of running a high-level language through a virtual machine is more than offset by the advantages of the language.

My second main contribution has been the development of the ground station server and the flight management software.  The ground station server is the central communication node between all ground station modules and it serves as the sole point of contact for the aircraft.  The flight management software is responsible for creating flight plans and directing the airplane where to go, at a high level.

Work on the MIT UAV Team has given me teamwork experience and, because the team is student-led, project leadership experience.  Without much faculty oversight, the burden of getting things done falls on me and other team members.

Imaging Software

(click for larger view)

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA

September 2005 to Current

Project Description