New micro air vehicle conference and competition

Date: 29 Apr 2004

News Item

The German Institute of Navigation, in association with Deutscher Aero Club eV and the DGLR, has announced what it terms the ‘first European Micro Air Vehicle conference and flight competition’.

EMAV 2004 will be held in Braunschweig (Germany), from 13-14 July 2004.

“Micro air vehicles (MAVs) are the smallest man-made flying machines. They are flying robots and have the weight and size of small birds,” said the Institute. “Innovation in navigation, control and processing technology has made this possible.

“However, there are numerous scientific challenges that need to be met to fly MAVs under all flight and all weather conditions. The development of miniaturised structures, propulsion and navigation systems, aerodynamics, flight controllers, actuators and sensors are just a few of the current research topics in the field of MAV-flight.”

With increasing civil and military demand for MAVs the German Institute of Navigation DGON has decided to host the 1st European Micro Air Vehicle Conference at the research airport of Braunschweig.

Topics will include guidance, navigation and control; sensors; fuselage and propulsion systems; MAV swarms and MAV operations. One session of the conference will be dedicated to the MAV flight competition, which is divided into two groups – the lightest MAV (fixed and rotary wing) and the autonomous MAV.

E-mail schulze-thesing.dgon.bonn@t-online.de or access the website at http://www.dgon.de/content/emav2004.php for further details.