Unmanned Systems Research Consortium

Research and Testing

Unmanned Systems Research Consortium Laboratory Resources

  • 1200 sq-ft laboratory facility with in-house manufacturing and access to high precision machining
  • Custom platform design for payload requirements including remote piloted and fully autonomous control
  • Electric, nitro-methane and gas propulsion systems
  • Unique mobile LiDAR 3D Scanning truck that can rapidly capture high-quality, geo-registered 3D point cloud data at a large scale
  • Multiple in-house options for 3-D printing, PCB fabrication and rapid prototyping
  • Complete composite fabrication from mold making to custom carbon-fabric lay-ups
  • Low- turbulence and custom wind tunnel test facilities
  • Commercial autopilots; extensive experience with Adrupilot, Openpilot, and PixHawk on Cortex-M4 processors (STM32F4)

Unmanned Systems Research Consortium Flight Testing Experience

  • More than 400 low-altitude flights with deployable-wing aerial platforms
  • Four successful high altitude (>60,000 ft) wing deployment experiments
  • Interfaced with FAA for high-altitude experiment planning and real-time communication
  • More than 50 flights developing test aerial platform capability and technology for wing-shaping flight control
  • More than 50 missions flown with autopilots integrated for data collection or flight control
  • More than 30 autonomous flights, including two flights with stability augmentation, 6.5 hours of autonomous flight time with industry standard commercial autopilots, and two flights with wing shaping.
  • More than 20 flights with integrated cameras: 8 with fixed view and 12 with gimbaled cameras controlled through the autopilot
  • Flight testing at hobbyist, private and FAA CoA (in process) sites

UK Unmanned Systems Research Consortium Events and Activities

Current research areas include, among others:

  • Evaluation of unmanned aerial LiDAR, imaging and other sensors for agricultural, infrastructure and forest management
  • Measurement and characterization of atmospheric turbulence, particularly in proximity to the ground
  • Multi-agent coordinated control for performance of individual-agent objectives or multi-agent objectives

Conference Presentations and Events:

  • 2013 Kentucky UAS Summit Host, Lexington KY, December 2013
  • 2014 National Farm Machinery Show, Louisville KY, February 2014
  • 2014 InfoAg, St. Louis MO, July 2014
  • 2015 Kentuckians for Better Transportation, Lexington, KY, January 2015
  • 2015 Intro to UAS Short Course, May 2015
  • 2015 Kentucky UAS Summit, date TBA