This article describes the efforts undertaken at the School of Aerospace Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology for the development of a low-cost Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) test-bed for educational purposes. The objective of this test-bed is to provide an avenue for the involvement of undergraduate students (primarily) and graduate students (secondarily) in UAV research. The complete design and development of all hardware interfaces of the UAV platform including the on-board autopilot is presented. Based on flight test data a linear model has been developed for the lateral and longitudinal dynamics.

Nowadays, it becomes a hot research topic for autonomous flight of Quadrotor in the complex environment and the realization of fully autonomous flight is still a big challenge. The path planning of unmanned aerial vehicle is a key problem for its autonomous flight. For the path planning of Quadrotor, using the quantum particle swarm optimization algorithm, and made a lot of simulation and actual flight experiments. The results of simulation and actual flight experiment show that the using of QPSO for the path planning of Quadrotor is able to obtain a satisfactory result.

The Multi-signal Flow Graph (MFG) is a simple and effective system modeling methodology, widely used in testability analysis and fault diagnosis field. In order to shorten the maintenance time and reduce the influence of human factors, the MFG method was introduced, and it was used to set up the testability model of aircraft Audio Management Unit (AMU) and found the fault-testability dependency matrix and the fault-fault dependency matrix. Based on dependency matrix and real unit fault message, the trapezoidal fuzzy number algorithm was introduced, thus the new fault diagnosis method was generated. Finally, an example proves that the fault diagnosis algorithm can not only locate the fault more accurately, but also improve the maintenance efficiency.

The avionics system is a core component of the civil aircraft. To reduce the risk and cost of developing avionics system, shorten the development cycle, through the development process of avionics systems, variety of simulation and verification must be done. The bus excitation signals need to be provided for each avionics unit and the signals from each avionics unit need to be received and processed. The multilayer abstract model and organizational structure model of the bus excitation system was established. And a complete bus excitation system was designed. In this system, the ARINC429 bus signals and discrete signals for communication and navigation equipments were provided, and the signals from the equipments were received and processed. This system has been tested, and one practical application example of the system was given.

According to a detailed study of the fault tree model of the flight control system about Boeing 777, a pre-program was established for the fault tree. The minimal cut sets of the treetops event was calculated by Fussell-Vesely algorithm. And the directed graph search process based on DFS and fault tree module searching method based on double DFLM was used to achieve modular decomposition of fault tree. Therefore, a better structure tree and better rules generate. Finally, it combines the fault tree fault model with the ARINC624 specification to achieve communication requirements between the central maintenance system and flight control system. The Boeing 777 maintenance model was realized.