Threading the Needle: Test and Evaluation of Early Stage UAS Capabilities to Autonomously Navigate GPS-Denied Environments in the DARPA Fast Lightweight Autonomy (FLA) Program

The DARPA Fast Lightweight Autonomy (FLA) program (2015 - 2018) served as a significant milestone in the development of UAS, particularly for autonomous navigation through unknown GPS-denied environments. Three performing teams developed UAS using a common hardware platform, focusing their contributions on autonomy algorithms and sensing. Several experiments were conducted that spanned indoor and outdoor environments, increasing in complexity over time. This paper reviews the testing methodology developed in order to benchmark and compare the performance of each team, each of the FLA Phase 1 experiments that were conducted, and a summary of the Phase 1 results.