CONTROL FAILURES IN AN UNMANNED AERIAL SYSTEM AND THE POTENTIAL FOR STATELESS CONTROL

Abstract

To participate in the 2019 SUAS competition, an Unmanned Aerial System (UAS), was built. Unfortunately, several critical failures occurred, including an unwanted circling behavior, and an unnecessary self-crash. The analysis of both behaviors revealed surface level errors in the scripts and devices that were used, but also a deeper flaw in the architecture of state based behaviors and conditional state transitions. To address these failures, an alternative architecture based around stateless controls was designed and tested. It successfully resolved the issues, and seems to hold promise as an alternative control system architecture, especially in non-linear environments.