23rd Congress of International Council of the Aeronautical Sciences, 8-13 September, 2002, Toronto, Canada
Paper ICAS 2002-R35

THE DEVELOPMENT OF A LOW COST AUTONOMOUS UAV SYSTEM

M. T. Lee, W-Y. Chang, C-C. Yang, K-W. Lin, Y-F. Tsai, C-R. Wu, F-B. Hsiao
National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan

Keywords: unmanned aerial vehicle, system integration, autonomous system

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) has proven their values and practicability in a variety of civil, military and scientific applications for many decades. With the aims of extensive usage of such UAV systems, this paper describes our attempt to create a miniature autonomous UAV in National Cheng Kung University (NCKU), including vehicle itself, optical payloads and a ground monitoring station in a low cost. Integrate essential hardware such as PC-104 single board computer, peripheral sensors, GPS and inertial measuring unit into a commercial R/C airplane. For the onboard software, the sensed-data and a proportional flight control (P-Control) program are processed on a real-time and multi-tasking operation system. This distributed software structure concept is highly modular to make the entire onboard system more flexible that can easily be reconfigured when necessary. In addition, a PC-base ground station is developed to display the real time in-flight information for the operators.

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