The goal of this project has been to construct an autonomous package that can easily be integrated into modest sized RPVs to transition them to fully autonomous flight. Design constraints were based on the transitioning of fixed wing RPVs to UAVs:

Economy - To be practical and affordable enough for integration into all levels of commercial and research need, the cost of autonomous flight control system had to stay below $5,000.00 USD.

Safety - An autonomous flight control system inherently removes human operator intervention from vehicle functionality. The capability of an aircraft of considerable mass, traveling at high velocity, to inflict damage to people or property is substantial. It was critical that the flight control system would include several modes of flight termination in case of emergency or flight control system failure.

Physical Constraints - The mass and physical dimensions of the flight control system had to be such that they were compatible not only with the prototype UAV, but also with a range of likely RPVs which were candidates for conversion to autonomous flight.

Capabilities – The core list of capabilities include the ability to reliably operate over and around a series of pre-determined position waypoints, while maintaining altitude and airspeed. The ability to operate out to over-the horizon ranges (10+ km) would also be beneficial. Also, capabilities specified by the AUVSI 1st Annual Student UAV competition, including waypoint tracking and aerial reconnaissance tasks were considered.

Reliability & Maintainability - In order to offer a viable autonomous flight solution for any application, especially research applications where repeated data loss can setback a research program considerably, it was critical that the system be robust and capable of continuous functionality.