Mmav - a Miniature Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (mini-uav)

1 INTRODUCTION Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAV) form a comparably new area of aeronautical research. This type of aircraft is defined by takeoff weights typically less than 500 g and very small dimensions, e.g. wingspans under 50 cm. Intense research is conducted worldwide to further reduce MAV mass and size (e.g. Within this paper, this term is expanded to also include so-called miniature unmanned aerial vehicles (Mini-UAV), which comprise typically of aircraft with a wingspan of a few meters and several kg of takeoff mass. Most current MAV projects concentrate on size and mass but neglect autonomous operation which means a pilot on the ground has to control the aircraft manually. The main research activity at the Institute of Aerospace Systems (ILR) of the Technische Universität Braunschweig, Germany, is the development of a fully autonomous MAV, operating without any intervention from ground.