Micro Air Vehicle

Ascending Technologies, Germany / MIT, Boston, USA

These two institutions jointly developed an autononomous Indoor MAV (Micro Air Vehicle), controlled by a CoreExpress^®-ECO module on a custom carrier board.

With this flying robot, the team from Ascending Technologies GmbH (AscTec) near Munich and the Boston MIT, USA, won the fifth mission of the oldest international robotics competition AUVSI International Aerial Robotics

The IARC website desribes the mission as such "The 5th Mission continued to adhere to the Competition's 18-year practice of posing tasks that cannot be completed with current technology and skills. As with previous missions, nothing within the World military or industrial arsenal of robots is able to complete the proposed mission at the time the guidelines are released." The AscTec/MIT team develoved the most advanced and reliable Indoor MAV for the competition in less than a year after the mission's objectives where published in 2008. With this system the competion's scenario could be mastered within the first year.

To complement their outstanding quadrocopters with an adequate powerful embedded computer, AscTec and MIT employed LiPPERT's CoreExpress^®-ECO module and augmented it with a specialized custom carrier board. The CoreExpress^®-ECO is the ideal candidate for a powerfule embedded PC. Its highly efficient Intel Atom Z5xx processor provides enough computing power for even the most challenging tasks in the embedded computing domain.

1. Heart of the quadrocopter: Carrier board with CoreExpress®-ECO (below the cooling fans)
2. The carrier board's bottom side with integrated WLAN card

Links

• Ascending Technologies
• IARC 5th Mission
• CoreExpress^®-ECO
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