San Giorgio Maggiore Island - Venice , Italy CEAS • 21 st AID AA

This paper focuses on the preliminary implemen-tation and performances assessment of an un-manned aerial vehicles (U.A.V.) controller. Al-though not showing any innovative technical as-pect of the automatic flight control, it underlinesthe simplicity of building a complete low cost un-manned aerial vehicle starting from a commer-cially available Ardupilot Mega board, telemetrymodules and a G.P.S. sensor. In order to assessthe reliability of this product some experimen-tal flights have been performed and the relevantmeasured and processed data show an acceptablebehaviour.The open source nature of this product repre-sents a revolutionary aspect of this technologyallowing an impressively fast understanding anddeveloping of these autonomous systems. Thisapproach is especially applicable to research andacademic environments.