The WITAS Project

Introduction: Test Flight Theaters

This UAV project focuses on the vehicle's ability to 'understand' ground scenarios of non-trivial complexity, and to act appropriately in response to them. It is therefore important for us to have access to a variety of ground scenarios that can be used for testing purposes, both in real and in simulated flights.

From the point of view of research methodology, we believe that it is very important that the subjects of these tests should be stable so that tests can be repeated, and that they should be publicly available so that others can study and check out the tests that we have made, and that serve as part of the evidence for our results. The availability of the WWW makes it very much easier, of course, to realize these ideas.

We have therefore defined a small number of testing areas or theaters where real and simulated test flights will be made. Several aspects are to be tested in these theaters: not only the UAV capability for autonomous control, but also the system's capability to interpret and to understand what it observes on the ground, for example, to understand traffic scenarios of nontrivial complexity. Our most important theaters are as follows:

• The Revinge theater, an area near Lund in southern Sweden that is set up for Rescue Service training. It contains a small town with roads and various kinds of buildings, and it can be fenced off which is a requirement when we make experimental flights with uncertified air vehicles. The yellow marked roads in the map are all within the the permitted flying area. Revinge can therefore be used for the whole range of real and simulation flights that are needed for our project. Its only disadvantage is that it is more than four hours driving distance from here.

• The Valla Campus theater, that is, a part of our own university campus, including a few roads and parking lots. We fly over the structures marked red, green and blue in the map; not over those marked with yellow color). In this area we are able to make flights with small, commersially available remote-controlled helicopters, but not flights with research helicopters having autonomous control. Even so, it is sufficient for collecting video recordings from the perspective of a small helicopter that views traffic from an angle above.

• The Kvarn theater, a military training ground about 50 km west of Linköping. It allows for the same kinds of flights as at Revinge, but has only a few buildings in the area where we will be allowed to fly.

Simulated flights are possible over all of these theaters, of course. At present we only have an air photograph mosaic for the Valla Campus theater; we are actively trying to procure similar mosaics for the two others.

The test flights require of course the use of real and simulated aircraft, in our case, helicopters. Please click the menu item for 'Helicopters' for more detailed specifications of the aircraft being used.

The following items under the present menu show still image and video illustrations from some of the real and simulated flights that have been made so far within the project.

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Latest update 6.6.2000 by EMTEK group. Edit mode aml, position code D.witas.testenv.intro.