The availability of commercial single antenna GPS units at low cost and discontinuation of selective availability of the system has cased an increased interest in flying a stable fixed-wing aircraft using GPS alone. Utilizing such an inexpensive sensor, along with a relatively simple processor, a flight control and guidance system could be developed that would be so inexpensive as to be practically disposable even for some commercial applications. A flight control and guidance system that can operate on single antenna GPS measurements is also a candidate as an ultimate backup mode for any uninhabited air vehicle or piloted airplane given failures of sensors. In this paper, necessary hardware and software developments will be described, as well as particular solutions explored in a flight test program.

The use of flight simulation tools to reduce the risk and required amount of flight testing for complex aerospace systems is a well recognized benefit of these tools. However, some special challenges arise when one attempts to extrapolate these benefits to very low-cost Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle (UAV) flight testing. These types of vehicles are characterized by a lack of payload capacity (and therefore limited in their capacity for additional flight test instrumentation or telemetry), limited baseline capabilities (processing, instrumentation, and telemetry), and by a lower marginal cost of added flight tests (less fuel, personnel, etc. is required per flight test, and a lower cost associated with a failure). In this paper, flight simulation architectures for system design and integration of low-cost UAVs are explored, and the development of a simulation tool for a low cost UAV described.

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