MissionLab: A Next Generation Mission Technology Research Platform Based on a Very Light Aircraft

With the aim of investigating novel mission technologies for manned and unmanned aerial vehicles, experimental platforms are required to enable their development and testing. In this paper, we describe a research platform based on a very light aircraft with mission payload pods mounted underneath its wings. On the hardware side, the modular system design includes a pod for power supply as well as a sensor pod containing a gimballed surveillance sensor unit with high-resolution sensors in the visual and infrared spectrum. Additionally, the sensor pod is equipped with an embedded mission computer and a data link via which video streams and other telemetry are sent to a ground control station in real-time. The software system design is based on the Robot Operating System 2 (ROS2) middleware and the encapsulation of individual functionalities using Docker containers. The research platform has already been tested in flight experiments and valuable data has been collected for our research use cases multi-target tracking, cloud detection and path planning.