Jackson State University computer engineering professor Kamal Ali has been awarded a research grant worth $517,062 from the U.S. Department of Defense for a three-year-project to build a simulator to test MAV autopilots.
The project title is “A Hardware-In-the-Loop-Simulation (HILS) System for the Simulation of Micro Air Vehicle (MAV) Flight.” The aim is to build a simulator that will allow Micro Aerial Vehicle’s (MAV) autopilot to be tested under all flight conditions in the laboratory. MAVs are small unmanned aircraft that are primarily used for reconnaissance. Using this system, a MAV’s autopilot can be made to fly any aircraft under any weather conditions in the laboratory, which averts delays caused by real testing
The project’s co-principal investigators are Abdelnasser Eldek, associate professor of computer engineering, and Mahmoud A. Manzoul, professor and chair of the Computer Engineering Department at Jackson State.