News Releases

The Aerial Recovery project completed 3 days of flight trials at the Dugway Proving Ground on 24 May 2012. The team flew 37 UAS flights totaling 535 minutes of flight time. New methods for controlling the drogue altitude were flown with a mothership UAS towing a drogue on a 100 meter cable. Aerial rendezvous methods using pure pursuit and velocity pursuit were also tried. The notable accomplishment from this round of testing was flying mothership, drogue and seeker UAS simultaneously using both drogue altitude control and vision rendezvous methods.

Robert Leishman presented work he and John Macdonald completed at ICRA 2012 in St. Paul, MN. The paper "Relative Navigation and Control of a Hexacopter" will be available through IEEE Xplore soon. It proposes a method to navigate using relative states rather than global states, as it typically done. The abstract for the paper is:

Dr. Derek Kingston of the Air Vehicles Directorate was presented with the Harold Brown award, the highest Air Force award given to a scientist or engineer who applies research to a problem in the field. Recipients are chosen by the Chief Scientist of the Air Force in honor of substantial improvement to the Air Force’s operational effectiveness.

In January, 2007, Dr. Beard of the MAGICC Lab received an announcement regarding a paper entitled Consensus seeking in multiagent systems under dynamically changing interaction topologies, written together with then Ph.D. candidate Wei Ren. Their paper was selected as a Fast Breaking Paper, meaning it was heavily cited in the engineering community.

BYU's MAGICC Lab entered the AUVSI MAV Competition held at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida on October 28-31, 2006 and placed first in the international competition. The event involved using a Micro Air Vehicle (MAV) outfitted with an autonomous system to image several ground targets at specified GPS locations and then drop a bomb (a paintball) on a specified target.

PROVO — Brigham Young University students are building small unmanned surveillance planes that could one day be used on the battlefield, in search-and-rescue operations or to track forest fires. BYU professors Randy Beard, left, and Tim McClain, right, in tie, and students show off one of their 3-pound surveillance planes. A video of the planes' daring maneuvers took the grand prize at the Infotech@Aerospace Video Competition, beating out several defense contractors. "We pushed the envelope," McClain says.

When the announcer called the overall winner a complete surprise, Tim McLain said his heart started beating faster, realizing the BYU engineering team had won.