NUS UAV Research
Led by Professor Ben M. Chen and Professor Tong H. Lee, the UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) Research Team in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the National University of Singapore has been working on various research projects related to defense technologies since 2003. The main focus is on unmanned rotorcraft systems and other vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) vehicles, and to explore the potentials of the next generation intelligent UAVs in various applications. Extensive research efforts are dedicated to cope with such challenges, in which a board range of disciplines are involved, including control theory, communications, aerodynamics, navigation, computer vision, multi-agent systems, hybrid systems and artificial intelligence. The research is sponsored by defense related organizations such as the Defense Science and Technology Agency (DSTA), Temasek Defence Systems Institute (TDSI), NUS Temasek Laboratories, and DSO National Laboratories.
The team has successfully constructed a family of unmanned helicopters with payloads ranging from few grams to over ten kilograms, and identified the fairly comprehensive aerodynamics of these miniature rotorcraft systems. A highly efficient onboard and ground station software system has also been developed for carrying out fully autonomous flight tests and coordination of the unmanned systems. The team has recently won the Best Application Paper Award at the 7th Asian Control Conference held in Hong Kong, August 2009 for the work on the design and implementation of robust automatic flight control system for a small-scale UAV helicopter.
A series of experiments on different aspects of the UAV applications have been conducted, which include actual flight tests for verifying the proposed cooperative control and formation flight of two unmanned helicopters, and the vision-based ground target tracking and following. The team has recently started developing the micro UAV coaxial VTOL prototype (with 20 cm rotor span) based on the micro and powerful processor/sensor units, as well as embedded real-time system design and programming. The micro UAV is expected to be the new generation of smart and intelligent vehicles that are capable of flying autonomously in an unknown and complex environment, especially in an indoor environment.
The team is currently in process to develop a 3D indoor navigation system, which is able to aid micro UAVs to safely navigate through the unknown and complicated indoor environment and complete autonomously necessary flight missions, and to develop long endurance unmanned rotary and fixed-wing systems, which are ideal for scientific research and have great potential in military and civilian domains. Progress has also been made on the development of unmanned ground vehicles.
