Verification of unmanned air vehicle flight control and surveillance using mobile communication

This paper presents a solution of real-time flight control and surveillance for unmanned air vehicles (UAV). To uplink and transmit the flight control commands, a μ P-controlled global system for mobile communications (GSM) circuit is designed using C8051 microprocessor; while to downlink flight surveillance data, an ARM CPU developed general packet radio service (GPRS) circuit is designed in μ CLinux to carry out always-connect communication. With system implementation, the mobile communication technologies are introduced into UAY flight control and surveillance application. In this paper, we use a 9 m airship for performance verification. The operation range is tested for 20 km below 1000 ft The control command delays less than 0.5s through mobile communication, when data transmission is continuously linked through general packet radio service (GPRS) in 9.6 kbps. The operators can monitor the airship on the geographical information system (GIS) with an accurate awareness of UAV flight data. The overall airship flight performance is excellent. The proposed system architecture and validation are completely satisfied to UAV performance requirements for wider range of surveillance and control where mobile communication is covered. Communication infrastructure and fare are also discussed in extremely low cost.