Flight Management System for a UAV Based on Optimal Control

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Uninhabited Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are becoming ubiquitous in our world. At a stage where the USA is opening its airspace to UAVs in 2015, Canada and the rest of the world will have a new industrial opportunity with enormous potential to move billions of dollars. The challenges are unprecedented. Without reliable, stable and high performance flight management systems (FMS) we simply cannot be successful. The company-specific problem of this research is to design an advanced FMS algorithm for UAVs that can save energy consumption while meeting desired goals for the UAV mission. The work will be done in collaboration with Marinvent Corporation who owns a flight simulator where the work will be tested. The innovative part of this research will be to combine two different existing methodologies of optimal control (maximum principle and moment approach) to solve a flight planning problem.