An economical approach to autopilot development and integration

Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are prohibitively expensive for use in civilian surveillance applications. This is in large part due to the manufactures need to recoup the costs of research and development. The more intelligence that is incorporated into unmanned vehicles, the more expensive it is to validate. At Cornell University an autopilot system for UAVs has been developed and integrated into a fixed wing aircraft on a budget of $15,000 and 3000 man hours dispersed over 6 months. This document describes the modern cost saving approaches used for developing the UAV, as well as the individual sub systems and the resulting UAV.