Jabiru Flight Research Laboratory

The J400 is a 4 seater light aircraft with a MTOW (Maximum Take-OffWeight) of 700 Kg. It has a cruise speed of 120 kts and a maximum service ceiling of 15,000 ft. The aircraft is used for teaching and research purposes at the university. A full flight and visual data acquisition system was developed in-house.

The data acquisition system is based around an NovAtel Span INS/GPS unit along with a magnetometer, air data probe, GPS receivers and control position transducers. The NovAtel Span INS/GPS unit provides highly accurate position, velocity and attitude estimates along with high rate inertial measurement. The additional three GPS receivers can provide standard GPS measurements as well as be used for GPS carrier phase attitude determination to provide highly accurate attitude information. The system runs on four dedicated Mac Mini computers. The vision system consists of 7 cameras, 5 low resolution camera mounted facing different directions around the aircraft for horizon detection and 2 high resolution cameras mounted facing 45 degrees downwards from the noise of the aircraft and directly downwards towards the belly of the aircraft for feature detection.