Aggieair: an Integrated and Effective Small Multi-uav Command, Control and Data Collection Architecture

Small UAV performance depends on an effective and efficient command system architecture. Based on an existing UAV system called Paparazzi, AggieAir is a full flight system capable of handling single or multiple UAVs with single or multiple payloads per airframe. System-level block diagrams are presented and specific details about implementation and results are provided. NOMENCLATURE UAV Unmanned Aerial Vehicle. IMU Inertial Measurement Unit. Typically a 3-axis roll rate gyro co-axial with a 3-axis accelerometer. INS Inertial Navigation System. Suggests a combination of IMU and other senors such as GPS via a software filter. INTRODUCTION An Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) is a complex aircraft system that is able to navigate without the control of a pilot. The inception of UAVs traces back to the World War I, which was primarily for military applications. However, its entry into the civil/commercial market is barely until the last few decades. There is increasing interest in developing UAV systems for variety of civil applications such as traffic control, border patrol, firefighting management [1], agriculture monitoring [2], etc. Different sizes, types and configurations of UAV is developed for the specific application. Generally speaking, the autonomous UAV system consists of automatic pilot system, navigation system that includes a wide variety of sensors, on-board microcomputer system as the data hub and ground control station that monitors and changes flight mission in real time. In the Center of Self-Organizing and Intelligent System (CSOIS) at Utah State University, miniature fixed-wing autonomous UAVs are developed for civil applications, such as water management, irrigation control, highway mapping, etc. The UAVs we developed are equipped with light-weighted multispectral high-resolution optical imager for aerial images within reconfigurable bands [3]. This paper presents a novel hardware and software architecture. AggieAir is fundamentally based on a proven system architecture: that of a real aircraft. Fig. shows a simplified version of this hierarchy, allowing specific mission tasks and goals. On the ground, the Flight Commander (a human, in the AggieAir system), oversees the whole mission as it progresses. The Science Team is also on the ground, monitoring data and controlling experiments on the plane in real time. FUNCTIONALITY AggieAir is a system with many parts and details. Overall, the aero-team paradigm can be seen illustrated in Fig. 1 Each 1 Copyright c © 2009 by ASME Proceedings of the ASME 2009 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference IDETC/CIE 2009 August 30 September 2, 2009, San Diego, California, USA