Software Design Of Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Ground Station

Depend on its own characteristics and incomparable advantages when compared with manned aircrafts,UAVs are widely used in military fields,but are also standout in various civilian fields.This paper made a detailed research and design for the development of the UAV ground station software platform,which is the command control center and the information processing center of UAV system.Based on the research present situation and the development trends of UAV ground station software platform,this paper studied the overall functional framework of UAV Ground Station and the way to realize it.According to the modular programming ideas,the functions of serial communication module,data processing module,virtual instrument and flying attitude 3D display module,electronic map module and flight path planning module are designed and implemented respectively.Most of the functions of the entire ground control station software platform are based on the LabVIEW development environment.With the help of VISA driver programming,UAV ground station is able to receive flight data from the communication link and send control instruction data to the UAV,which are the functions of serial communication software;By using the development features and abundant extended function library of LabVIEW,the module functions of flight data information storage and reading,real-time flight attitude displaying were designed and implemented;Furthermore,by utilizing its massive display and operation widgets,a concise and efficient software interface is designed.Two different data displays of text and virtual aviation instrument are realized,which is convenient for operators to acquire flight status of the UAV;Through the secondary development of the MapX plugin,the related operations of the electronic map and the real-time location display of the latitude and longitude position information of the drone are realized;At last,under the situation of existing threat areas and complex conditional constraints in the actual flight mission of UAV,a variety of condition constraints about the maximum heading angle,the minimum track segment length and the maximum voyage are added to the traditional A-Star track searching algorithm.The algorithm and the calculation method of cost function are improved at the same time.The algorithm of A-Star track searching is improved and simulated through MATLAB programming,and the practical application of the algorithm is realized by the design of coordinate transforming program.The software platform is based on Windows portable computer for developing and testing.Considering the high cost of online test of UAV ground station,the method of software testing is applying RS232 serial communication between computers to simulate the communication and control between the UAV and the ground station.Through the design of simulated flight data information,the function of the software modules was tested,and the performance of software platform was verified to meet the application requirements.