Unmanned Aerial Systems have rapidly reached the maturity allowing them to be used in many civil applications. Open-source communities and research laboratories have played an important role to this breakthrough in aviation history. I will present the Paparazzi UAV system, a research oriented fully open-source hardware and software project dedicated to mini and micro drones. Through its rich history of collaborations, I will show how our laboratory and our community have been able to contribute to various HMI innovations, rich flight plan concepts, novel aerodynamic designs, efficient and robust control algorithms and many multi-disciplinary applications spreading the usage of drones in various scientific fields. This has been made possible by seeking the right balance between innovations, experimental needs, real world operations and more fundamental contributions. Finally, I will point to some of the future challenges for light UAV systems.

The discussion following this talk will be moderated by Yu David Liu.

Gautier Hattenberger is an assistant-professor at the French Civil Aviation University (ENAC) in Toulouse, France. As a member of the UAV Research Program, he is working on flight dynamics and control of micro-UAVs, modeling and simulation, architecture of embedded systems, trajectory planing and formation flight. Most of his work is based on the Open-Source UAV system “Paparazzi”, for which he is now one of the head developer. He graduate from the French national engineering school of aeronautical construction in 2004 and received his Ph.D Degree at the Robotic department of the Laboratory for Analysis and Architecture of Systems (LAAS-CNRS, Toulouse), for his work on formation flight control and planing of UAVs in 2008.