The bormatec Maja is a commercially available RC plane and is designed as a platform for typical UAV applications such as aerial photography. The Maja that is used at iFR is a heavily customized version. Among other things, the stock propulsion system at the tail has been replaced by an electric drive in the nose of the aircraft and a landing gear has been retrofitted to enable the testing of ATOL algorithms.
The Maja is used as a verification platform for flight control algorithms developed in-house, such as basic control, trajectory following, automatic takeoff and landing, reinforcement learning, trajectory planning including collision avoidance, and geofencing. It is also used as an experimental platform for the algorithms developed by students in the Aerobotics Seminar offered as part of the master’s program.