Abstract:  This talk will provide an overview of several research projects currently underway in the BYU Magicc Lab.  The first project that will discuss is relative navigation in GPS degraded environments.   There are many applications where GPS is either restricted or denied.   We have developed an architecture that uses a relative front end to navigate relative to key frames, and then opportunistically uses GPS measurements and SLAM-style loop closures in a back end process to provide global context.  We will show some recent flight results that demonstrate robustness to GPS failure and degradation.  The second project that we will discuss is the development of a sense and avoid system for small UAS.  We have developed a small radar system for air and ground based detection, and associated detection, tracking, and avoidance algorithms.  The third project is an autopilot design for a unique tailsitter aircraft.  We will focus on attitude estimation and the design of the transition trajectories.  Finally, we describe a project that focuses on robust tracking of multiple ground based targets from an airborne platform.  We will present a new multiple target tracking algorithm that is based on the random sample consensus (RANSAC) algorithm that is widely used in computer vision.  A recursive version of the RANSAC algorithm will be discussed, and its extension to tracking multiple dynamic objects will be explained.  The performance of R-RANSAC will be compared to state of the art target tracking algorithms in the context of problems that are relevant to UAV applications.

Biography:  Randal W. Beard received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Utah, Salt Lake City in 1991, the M.S. degree in electrical engineering in 1993, the M.S. degree in mathematics in 1994, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering in 1995, all from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY. Since 1996, he has been with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, where he is currently a professor. In 1997 and 1998, he was a Summer Faculty Fellow at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA. In 2006 and 2007 he was a visiting research fellow at the Air Force Research Laboratory, Munitions Directorate, Eglin AFB, FL. His primary research focus is autonomous control of small air vehicles and multivehicle coordination and control. He is a past associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, the IEEE Control Systems Magazine, and the Journal of Intelligent and Robotic Systems.  He is a fellow of the IEEE, and an associate fellow of AIAA.

http://www.ee.byu.edu/faculty/beard/

Professor Randal W. Beard is the author of "Small Unmanned Aircraft. Theory and Practice". Princeton University Press, 2012.

http://uavbook.byu.edu