Novel Autopilot System for Rotary Unmanned Aircraft Wins Innovation Award

Konkuk University

in South Korea won the new NI LabVIEW FPGA Innovation Award for a novel autopilot system for a rotary unmanned aircraft to ensure on-course stability of a helicopter in a programmed flight path.

The presentation was made at the Graphical System Design Achievement Awards ceremony at the Austin Convention Center during the NIWeek 2011 Worldwide Graphical System Design Conference and Exhibition in Austin, Texas by Xilinx Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing and Business Development, Vin Ratford,

The Konkuk University design team was honoured for a novel instrumentation platform that fully exploits the advantages of the FPGA to process substantial amounts of sensor data in its  “Rotary UAV Autopilot – Navigation and Autopilot System Development of RUAV based on Virtual Instrumentation Platform” paper.  It describes the exceptional use of LabVIEW software to programme an NI Single-Board RIO FPGA module as an autopilot for a small unmanned helicopter using a virtual instrumentation platform.  The autopilot system processes information from sensors that included GPS navigation, an inertial measurement unit, a photo sensor capturing main rotor RPM data, and barometric altimeter to accurately follow a programmed flight path, while keeping the helicopter stable and on-course. Konkuk University students Byoung-Jin Lee and Seung-Jun Lee accepted the award at last night’s ceremony.

Winning design teams were selected by a judging panel of National Instruments (NI) and Xilinx participants in recognition for the most innovative applications using NI LabVIEW system design software to programme the field-programmable gate array (FPGA) in NI hardware to boost overall system performance. Notably, this year’s Graphical Design Achievement Awards competition achieved a new record with 130 total submissions across all award categories from 20 countries in a diverse set of applications.

“We’re delighted with the phenomenal response from industry and academia to this year’s first-ever LabVIEW FPGA design achievement award,” said Ratford.  “The market-changing products and technologies we considered in this competition each hold the promise of improving the quality of our everyday lives. 

“Tonight we celebrate all of the talented engineering teams who submitted inventions that tapped into the power of programmable logic. I’m especially proud to honour this year’s LabVIEW FPGA award recipients from Konkuk University for exemplifying the tremendous performance, flexibility and freedom afforded by FPGAs for tackling complex engineering challenges.”

Source: Press Release

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