Data Acquisition And Processing Of The On-Board Sensor System Of A Quadrotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

In recent years, quadrotor helicopter has become a hotspot of the research about unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). It has high maneuverability, easy maintance, simple configuration, and the ability of agile hovering, vertical takeing off and landing (VTOL). Because of their huge potential application values for civil and military utilization, researches on the architecture of flight control system (FCS) are conducted by many universities and companies to achieve autonomous flight control of quadrotors. Onboard sensor system is a very important component of flight control system because it will supply reliable flight informations of quadrotor for the flight controller.In this thesis, a self assembled quadrotor helicopter is used as the airframe for the flight control system design. The research about the onboard sensor system which consists of micro attitude heading reference system(AHRS)and sonar is done. The data acquisition and processing about the flight information of quadrotor is accomplished. The autonomous hovering control of quadrotor cooperating with flight control system onboard is achieved. First, a complete platform of flight control system onboard is estibalished by the re-development of ARM embedded controller. The OE crsoss compilation environment is set up to make it possible for the scource code to be run on the ARM embedded controller. Secondly, onboard data accquiration and processing are implemented. Analysising the message structure of the AHRS in specified operation mode is also presented. Based on the serial asynchronous communication protocol, the data transmission mechanism under Linux operation system is completed. Then the attitude and position data of quadrotor UAV are obtained. Based on I2C communication theory, the data of sonar by C++ programming under Linux operation system is collected to indicate the flight height of quadrotor UAV. Finally, based on UDP network protocol, the data communication program between the server (quadrotor helicopter) and the client (Ground Control System, GCS) is developed to send/receive and store the flight data of quadrotor.