In the mid 1990's, interest in small UAVs and their potential applications increased significantly in the aerospace community. The potential of developing small vehicles that could carry out a wide variety of missions became a reality with miniaturization of sensor systems, in particular, Global Positioning System (GPS) technology. The small size of this new class of aircraft (wingspans on the order of 10 ft or so) makes them ideally suited for integration into an academic program, allowing students to experience the full spectrum of engineering issues of a complex system. Realization of this fact led the faculty of the Aeronautics and Astronautics department to actively focus both research and educational efforts on UAVs. To bring realism to these efforts, close collaboration was established with The Insitu Group in the mid 1990's. A landmark event of this collaboration was the historic crossing of the North Atlantic by the Aerosonde Laima.

Aerosonde Laima lifts out of a cartop launch cradle

Aerosonde Laima lifts out of her cartop launch cradle on Bell Island, Newfoundland, 7:29 local time on 20 August 1998. Through a stormy night over the Atlantic, she was guided by the old-world luck of her namesake (pronounced "Lye-mah"), the ancient Latvian deity of good fortune, and the new-age technology of GPS. After 26 hr 45 min she plopped down in a meadow on South Uist, off the Scottish coast, and so became the first unmanned aircraft - and, at only 13 kg gross weight, by far the smallest aircraft - ever to have crossed the Atlantic.

Laima's Atlantic crossing in stormy weather

The satellite photo of the weather conditions mid-way through the flight, with the flight path overlaid, shows the challenges faced by Laima.

Laima in the Seatle Museum of Flight

Laima now is on display at the Seattle Museum of Flight. A complete discussion of this historic flight is given in McGeer and Vagners

Since that time, cooperation in miniature UAV research and development with the Insitu Group has continued and been extended to autonomous vehicle systems in general.

Many current and future applications, both military and civilian, call for coordinated operation of systems of heterogeneous autonomous vehicles in complex, uncertain environments. Thus, we are investigating technology for Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUVs), Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs) as well as UAVs separately as well as collectively in cooperative team contexts. Our research focus has been extended to various aspects of operating such systems, ranging from developing algorithms to increase autonomy to human operator interfaces to the all-pervasive problem of communications within such systems.

Related research in autonomous systems in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics is in autonomous underwater vehicles as well as network dynamics, dynamics of systems evolving over networks and constrained motion planning and control with a focus on spacecraft applications.