Design And Implementation Of UAV Ground Station Software System

In recent years, there has been an increasing focus on the research and application of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) in the world, our country is also making a considerable investment on the research and development of UAV. The UAV ground station software is an integral part of the ground station system, which is the command and control center of the entire UAV system. A full-featured UAV ground station software system can support the monitoring and real-time remote control of the UAV.Combined with experiences of the author, who involved in the development of a high-speed UAV, this article discusses how to build a full-featured UAV ground station software system, by utilizing serial communication programming, component GIS development and ADO-based database operation technology.The ground station communicates with the UAV using a dedicated data link system through the serial port. Because of the high speed and frequency of downlink data, the realization of high-speed real-time serial communication is very important. To meet the real-time communication requirement, we choose to improve the real-time performance of the serial port class CSuperSerialPort and implement a high-precision timer.Based on ArcGIS geographic information systems and ArcObjects Component GIS development technology, we realize various functions of the map-based UAV navigation. Meanwhile, through the application of digital elevation model, we implement the function of providing three-dimensional flight navigation service for the UAV.Using ADO technology to operate the navigation database, we realize the route planning and track playback function of the UAV ground station software. With the use of two technologies: Dynamically creating a data table and operating BLOB binary data with ADO objects, we achieve a high efficiency of operating the database to record a large size of flight tracking data.Practice shows that, used in conjunction with other parts of the UAV ground station system, the basic functions of the ground station software has been able to meet the needs of the ground operator executing UAV flight tasks.