Maja Varga, our LARICS young scientist, currently a PhD student at the EPFL Lausanne, Switzerland, held a very interesting lecture about the fixed wing robots being used in numerous outdoor applications, such as providing area coverage, mapping applications, providing communication relay, environmental monitoring. In many of those applications, exact path of the robot is preprogrammed and mission is usually planned in advance. Each flying robot needs a dedicated human operator to provide safe flight.
The question arises of what is necessary to add to the functionality of fixed wing robots to make them more autonomous, reactive and less dependent on the human intervention. In her talk, she presented control methodologies to overcome unicycle dynamics of the fixed wing flying robots to make the platforms more reactive and control architecture to enable switching between different flying robot behaviors.