This thesis relates to the successful development of a flight control system to perform a range of aerobatic manoeuvres autonomously. The project is the first to try to extend the flight control capabilities of the ...

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Search and Rescue is an essential service provided by States and Militaries to search for, locate and rescue survivors of accidents and incidents. Civil Search and Rescue utilizes a system of well-trained ...

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis presents the analysis, design, simulation and practical implementation of a control system to achieve an accurate autonomous landing of a fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle in the presence ...

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Fault detection and isolation (FDI) is an important aspect of effective fault tolerant control architectures. The Electronic System Laboratory at Stellenbosch University identified the need to study ...

This project developed a low-cost avionics system for a miniature helicopter to be used for research in the field of autonomous flight (UAVs). Previous work was done on a small, electrically powered helicopter with some ...

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The successful development of an autopilot for an unmanned helicopter is presented. The helicopter model is developed from first principles. The model is decoupled to enable the design of four separate ...

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The development of an integrated avionics system containing all the required sensors and actuators for autopilot control is presented. The thesis analyzes the requirements for the system and presents ...

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis presents the development of a stall prevention flight control subsystem, which can easily be integrated into existing flight control architectures of fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles ...

This thesis presents the design of a control system for the autonomous precision landing of an unmanned aerial vehicle aided by an infra red camera for precision position measurements. An optimal kinematics state estimator ...

A real time attitude and heading reference system (AHRS) was successfully implemented for use on an airship. The AHRS was tested on board a small airship (blimp) with real data supplied from the inertial measurement unit ...