Verification and Validation of Autonomous Flight in an Unstructured and GPS Degraded Environment

Sponsor: NASA Independent Validation & Verification (IV&V) Facility and NASA WV Space Grant Consortium

Autonomous navigation in an unstructured environment, as an essential requirement for applications such as search and rescue or exploration of planetary surfaces, has long been a challenging research topic in the robotics community. The difficulty of achieving such a goal lies not only in the complexity of individual sensing, planning, and control techniques, but also in the Verification and Validation (V&V) of an autonomous system that interacts directly with the physical environment. Within this project, we will perform a case study of 3D navigation within an unstructured and GPS degraded environment. Specifically, we will design, verify, and flight validate a quadrotor that can autonomously navigate through a random wooded lot. The main technical objective of this effort is to achieve a seamless integration of advanced sensor fusion, path planning, and flight control techniques in a practical mission scenario, and to verify and validate the developed autonomous system using both analytical and empirical methods.