Automated multiple UAV flight - the Stanford DragonFly UAV Program

The Stanford DragonFly Program (http://airtrafficl.stanford.edu//spl sim/uav/) consists of two fixed wing (10-foot wingspan) autonomous aircraft, whose onboard architecture, avionics, control, and integration with wireless communications have been developed entirely at Stanford. The DragonFly platform is used as a technology testbed for research in the design of a decision-theoretic real-time operating system, and to experimentally validate hybrid control of single vehicles, and real time danger zone computation and avoidance for two automated vehicles flying in parallel. Since June 2003, we have been successfully flying the two automated DragonFly aircraft simultaneously, in dual vehicle approach patterns, and have demonstrated our automatic collision avoidance system on this platform (one aircraft 'blunders' into the path of the second, the other invokes an 'emergency escape maneuver' based on the relative configuration of the two aircraft). In June 2004, based on the success of our DragonFly tests, we flew our software on a Boeing test platform of two aircraft: an F-15, and a T-33 test aircraft.