This paper describes the process and challenges behind the design and development of a micro-gravity enabling aerial robot. The vehicle, designed to provide at minimum 4 seconds of micro-gravity at an accuracy of .001 g's, is designed with suggestions and constraints from both academia and industry as well a regulatory agency. The feasibility of the flight mission is validated using a simulation environment, where models obtained from system identification of existing hardware are implemented to increase the fidelity of the simulation. The current development of a physical test bed is described. The vehicle employs both control and autonomy logic, which is developed in the Simulink environment and executed in a Pixhawk flight control board.
@article{arxiv.1611.07650,
title = {On the Design and Optimization of an Autonomous Microgravity Enabling Aerial Robot},
author = {Juan-Pablo Afman and John Franklin and Mark L. Mote and Thomas Gurriet and Eric Feron},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1611.07650},
year = {2016}
}