The Development of a Low-cost MEMS Gyroscope/GPS Navigation System for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

摘要

Grasping the recent developments in miniature-sized computer, its peripherals, electronic sensors, and optical sensing equipment at affordable cost, the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) with functions of long endurance and flight autonomy beyond the visual range has gradually undertaken an attractive challenge in the university sector. Based on these specific mission requirements and employing the existing commercial on-the-shelf products, this paper focuses on the development of a low-cost simple navigation system for the model kit size UAV of Cessna 182 with a CCD optical payload system for acquiring and transmitting images. The navigation system is designed through a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver and three miniaturized home-designed 3-axis rate gyroscopes. The mission requirements of the navigation system deem it to detect the three dimensional position, velocity and attitude, including roll, pitch and yaw angles of UAV. The attitude measurement system, which is of the strapdown type, is therefore developed to use the 3-D navigation system for the optical sensing system. The Garmin GPS-25 is adopted for position and velocity observations. In addition, the air data sensing system is composed of a pressure altitude sensor and airspeed sensor to detect the pressure altitude and airspeed. The whole system has been successfully demonstrated in the flight tests to be capable of providing the desired navigation information in real-time at the low-cost objective.