News Releases

Our lab met with industry and academic partners in Dayton, Ohio! The Industry Advisory Board (IAB) meeting was a great opportunity to present recent research and discuss future research initiatives.

Two MAGICC Lab members, Laith Sahawneh and Peter Neidfeldt, both Ph.D. students, had papers accepted to the 53rd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control. Laith's paper is titled "A Probabilistic Framework for Unmanned Aircraft Systems Collision Detection and Risk Estimation," and Peter's "Robust Estimation with Faulty Measurements using Recursive-RANSAC." Dr. Randy Beard was co-author on both papers.

The American Controls Conference notified authors of submitted papers of their decision. Three papers submitted by MAGICC lab members were accepted:"Multiple Target Tracking with Recursive RANSAC" (Peter Niedfeldt, Randy Beard)"Tailsitter Attitude Control During Hover Flight"

Peter Niedfeldt, Eric Quist, and Randy Beard will be participating in an invited session at RadarCon2014 on "Radar Aided Navigation Positioning and Mapping". Their submission is entitled "Characterizing Range Progression of SAR Reflectors with Recursive RANSAC".

MAGICC lab student Robert Klaus was selected as a finalist in the 2013 AIAA GNC Conference Graduate Student Paper Competition. The conference submission, “A Radar-Based, Tree-Branching Sense and Avoid System for Small Unmanned Aircraft” co-authored with Robert’s advisor, Dr. Timothy McLain, was presented at a special competition session with the other finalists in front of a panel of judges.

In conjunction with the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Infotech@Aerospace Conference that was held in Boston during 19-22 August 2013. AIAA organized a workshop on “Airborne Networks and Communications”. The workshop includes several invited presentations from representatives of industry, national labs, government, and universities and regular paper presentations.

Check out the video of our latest test flight for the relative GPS-denied navigation system. This flight is part of the indoor navigation research effort.

Jeff Ferrin, Peter Niedfeldt and Joe Nichols presented papers at the AIAA Guidance, Navigation and Control Conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota, 13-16 August 2012. The three papers were:

The Magicc Lab was featured on a recent episode of Backstage BYU. The show can be seen here. Our segment appears about eighteen minutes into the show. Enjoy!!!

The Aerial Recovery Phase II STTR sponsored by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research completed its final period of flight trials on 28 June 2012 at Dugway Proving Grounds, Utah. The BYU-Lockheed Procerus team flew 50 times for a total of 645 minutes of flight time over the 4 day test period.