THE DEVELOPMENT OF A LOW COST AUTONOMOUS UAV SYSTEM

摘要

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) hasrnproven their values and practicability in arnvariety of civil, military and scientificrnapplications for many decades. With the aims ofrnextensive usage of such UAV systems, one ofrnmajor enabling-technologies is the automationrnof the system. This paper describes our attemptrnto create a miniature autonomous UAV inrnNational Cheng Kung University (NCKU),rnincluding vehicle itself, optical payloads and arnground monitoring station in a low cost.rnIntegrate essential hardware such as PC-104rnsingle board computer, peripheral sensors, GPSrnand inertial measuring unit into a commercialrnR/C airplane. For the onboard software, thernsensed-data and a proportional flight controlrn(P-Control) program are processed on a realtimernand multi-tasking operation system. Thisrndistributed software structure concept is highlyrnmodular to make the entire onboard systemrnmore flexible that can easily be reconfiguredrnwhen necessary. In addition, a PC-base groundrnstation is developed to display the real time inflightrninformation for the operators.