Uniform System for the Rapid Prototyping and Testing of Controllers for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

The field of control systems has witnessed an explosion in state-space techniques addressing a variety of critical design issues facing control engineers today. Modem computational tools, such as the MATRIX, . Product Family developed by Integrated Systems Incorporated, allow the designer to quickly design, test and implement control systems based on these state-space techniques. These new computing advances shorten the time required to complete a control design from a few years to a few months. However, as the design process progressed new inputs and outputs were required, which usually resulted in a confusing mess of connections that were hard to follow. Therefore, a universal system was needed that could be used on any controller design to aid in the understanding and tracking of the controller's inputs and outputs. A description of this system is given along with a detailed step by step process on how it was implemented on a Unmanned Air Vehicle (UAV)