Maritime flight trials of the Southampton University laser sintered aircraft–Project Albatross

Abstract

As part of the ongoing development of small unmanned air systems by the University of Southampton an all laser sintered aircraft has been test flown from the Royal Navy's ice patrol ship HMS Protector to assist with navigating through the Antarctic. These flights were carried out with pre-planned autopilot control with oversight from Andrew Lock, acting as the Pilot embarked on HMS Protector. This is the first time the Royal Navy has used unmanned aerial vehicles in this part of the world. In this paper we set out the trials reports and lessons learnt from this series of test flights. Additive manufacturing in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)The advent of low cost and light weight autonomous control systems, rare earth magnet electric motors and powerful LiPo batteries has resulted in a huge surge in the development and use of small, lightweight UAVs (commonly referred to as drones). While the initial developments of UAV technology were the preserve of the military and security agencies, the vast majority of these systems are now sold into the hobby market, in the form of small multi-rotor systems carrying small cameras. More recently, a number of commercial and scientific sectors, ranging from farming, to plant maintenance, to disaster monitoring to photography, have taken up such technologies in significant numbers, see for example (Zhang & Kovacs, 2012) and (Adams & Friedland, 2011).At the same time a number of new manufacturing technologies have impacted on developments in this field. In particular the availability of low costs additive manufacturing (3D printing) has provided design freedom to those wishing to make specialist UAVs in modest quantities for research and scientific purposes, or for initial prototyping of systems before committing to large scale manufacture. A thorough and recent review of the use of additive manufacture and its use in UAV design is provided by (Goh, et al., 2017). They cite, for example, the work of (Ahmed & Page, 2013) who describe the use of 3D printing to create a small scale test model for wind tunnel testing and validation. Also that of (Ferraro, Lock, Scanlan, & Keane, 2014) who recount their experiences with a larger maritime surveillance UAV which includes substantial elements of 3D printed structure. The first fully 3D printed UAV flown was the Southampton University Laser Sintered Aircraft (SULSA), which was developed to demonstrate what was possible with this newly emerging combination of technologies in a fixed wing format (Marks, 2011). Since that time the SULSA aircraft has been used for a number of further studies, the latest of which is the subject of this article. Southampton University Laser Sintered Aircraft (SULSA)The Southampton University Laser Sintered Aircraft (SULSA) is an all laser sintered, battery powered sub 4kg unmanned air vehicle (UAV) with on-board GPS enabled autopilot, see Figure 1. Basic details of the system are set out in Table 1. SULSA was originally designed, built and flown to demonstrate the possibilities of using as much 3D pri...

UAVs for Science in Antarctica

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Glider Routing and Trajectory Optimisation in disaster assessment

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