Development of a small parafoil vehicle for precision delivery

The goal of the MIT Draper Partnership Program is to develop a system capable of deploying a cluster of ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance) sensors over an area of interest. One of the proposed methods is a guided parafoil vehicle that is deployed from a UAV. After unfurling its canopy, it is envisioned that the vehicle would follow a planned trajectory to the target, and vision-based targeting system would be employed to provide the necessary accuracy. A 6DOF parafoil simulation was created in the Matlab/Simulink environment to study the parafoil dynamics and assess the feasibility of the delivery method. The parafoil's range and controllability were tested under a variety of simulated wind conditions, and a hypothetical mission was conceived to evaluate the performance of the proposed trajectory designs and guidance laws. Also, an extended Kalman filter was incorporated into the simulation to determine effectiveness of the camera-based targeting system and other navigation sensors.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2005

Author dc:creator

• Toohey, Damian

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• John J. Deyst.

• Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/32457

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/32457