Project Overview

Northrop Grumman Collaboration Project solves a search-and-rescue mission with autonomous vehicles developed from Cal Poly SLO and Cal Poly Pomona collaborating together. The goal of the mission to extract targets from a disaster area. We deliberately complicate this simple goal to involve multiple vehicles from both campuses in collaboratively delivering the care package.

The VTOL is an aerial vehicle that can take off vertically as a quadcopter and transition into a fixed wing aircraft upon reaching altitude. This vehicle hosts a Raspberry Pi which has access to the vehicle's control system, enabling autonomous flight. The VTOL software team develops the autonomous software that runs on this vehicle.

In the context of NGCP's rescue mission, the primary objective of the VTOL is to fly to the waiting UGV, and airlift the package containing the targets back to mission command while in communication with GCS. Our goal for this year is to enact this in a GPS denied environment.

The VTOL team maintains several redundant levels of functionality, as we need to be able to run some MVP on demo day. These levels are the following:

MVP (minimum viable product)

• Autonomous takeoff, landing and navigation using GPS
• Manual transition

Level 1:

• Autonomous takeoff, landing and navigation WITHOUT using GPS
• Manual transition

Level 2:

• Autonomous takeoff, landing and navigation WITHOUT using GPS
• Autonomous transition

Level 3:

• Autonomous takeoff, landing and navigation WITHOUT using GPS
• Autonomous transition
• Utilize ML to guide SLO UGV through obstacles