The Development of Data Collection and Navigation System for an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

• Main Authors: Wen-chi Lu, 呂文祺
• Other Authors: Fei-Bin Hsiao
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2001
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/29361459034099502534

碩士 === 國立成功大學 === 航空太空工程學系 === 89 === Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) have proven their values and possessed their places in the applications among the unmanned systems in the real world. They are deployed and operated in military operations and scientific research to perform powerful intelligence collection capability, and highly reduce the operation cost. This article primarily describes the developments and integration of an onboard system with data collection and navigation capabilities for an UAV in autonomous flight. A specified PC-104 single board computer (SBC) receives the data acquired from the peripheral sensors (altitude sensor, airspeed sensor, and attitude sensors), processes, stores in the onboard solid disk, and transmits to the ground station by a transceiver. In addition to the data collection function, the onboard GPS receiver provides the navigation information for the onboard system. For the onboard software, different software takes charge of different function based on a real-time and multi-tasking operating system, QNX4. The distributed structure concept makes the onboard software highly modular and increases the reliability to avoid the entire system crashed induced by some bugs in the software. The modularity makes the system reconfigured easily by inserting additional software without changing entire software structure. A set of wireless modems bridges the onboard system and the ground station. The ground station is constructed based the LabVIEW software to display the data collected by the onboard system. At the same time, the data communication capability is evaluated and tested for practical operations. Abstract II Acknowledgement III Table of Contents IV List of Tables VII List of Figures VIII Chapter 1. Introduction 1 1.1 Unmanned Aerial Vehicles 1 1.2 The UAV Activities in Universities 5 1.3 Motivation and Objectives 8 Chapter 2. System Overview 11 2.1 System Objectives 11 2.2 System Architecture 11 2.3 System Overview 11 2.3.1 Vehicle 11 2.3.2 Onboard Computer 12 2.3.3 Sensors 12 2.3.4 Communication 13 2.3.5 Electric Power 13 2.3.6 Ground Station 13 Chapter 3. Vehicle System 14 3.1 Vehicle Selection and Specifications 14 3.2 Performance Estimation 17 3.3 Manufacture 20 3.4 Components Distribution 23 Chapter 4. Onboard System 24 4.1 Onboard Hardware 24 4.1.1 Onboard Computer and Its Peripherals 24 4.1.2 Air Data Sensing System 27 4.1.3 Dynamic Measurement Unit 29 4.1.4 Global Positioning System 34 4.1.5 Communication System 36 4.1.6 Power System 43 4.2 Onboard Software 45 4.2.1 Real-Time Operating System QNX 45 4.2.2 Software Structure and Process flow 46 Chapter 5. Ground System 50 5.1 Ground System Architecture 50 5.2 LabVIEW 50 5.3 Telemetry Data Processing and Display 51 5.4 Graphical Interface 53 Chapter 6. System Tests 54 6.1 System Test Procedures 54 6.2 Ground Tests 55 6.2.1 EMI Tests 55 6.2.2 Serial Data Transmission Tests 57 6.3 Ground Vehicle Test 58 6.4 Flight Tests 60 Chapter 7. Conclusions and Future Work 61 7.1 Conclusions 61 7.2 Future Work 64 References 65 Vita 68