Design And Implementation Of Small UAV Ground Station Software System

With the rapid development of computer, microelectronics and control technology,the flight control technology and the related issues of ground station of the small unmanned aerial vehicle(SUAV) gradually become the research hot topic in the world,for which is widely applied to military demand and civil commercial area. Since the ground station is the command center of the SUAV system, it will be of great significance to study the key techniques and implementation method involved in the ground station software for the engineering implementation and application of the SUAV system.In this thesis, our work is to develop the design and implementation methods of the ground station software system of the SUAV. This software system provides the flight status monitoring, real-time playback of aerial video, the electronic map, path planning,a serial port communication and the storage and analysis of the data for the SUAV as well as interacts with the SUAV in real time. In the thesis, the involved application technologies are mainly electronic map technology, FFmpeg encoding library, the serial port communication technology and the MAVLink protocol.Firstly, we propose the new desired functions of the ground station software system according to the project requirements by compared to the main characteristics of the ground station software, where we introduce the composition and the current researches of the SUAV and the ground stations. Secondly, we investigate the key techniques to achieve the desired functions in the process of software development of the ground station. Thirdly, we present the overall design of the software system of the SUAV ground station and make an elaborate discussion on the design of each module on each functional level by the functional division of the software system. Based on the functions of the system, this paper addresses the main three problems to achieve the desired functions: the function realization of the user operation layer, which includes the design and implementation of the software interface, the functional operation realization of the electronic map, the flight state display and the control instructions achievement and the implementations of the real-time video player as well as the flight path planning;the implementation of the data communication layers, which presents the detailed study of the process of realizing the serial port communication; the achievement of the datestorage and data analysis in the data management levels.Finally, we conduct a number of tests of the development of the ground station software system as well as combine with the SUAV. The test results indicate that the ground station software can achieve the real-time reception and display accuracy of telemetry data, real-time playback of the aerial video, successfully display the waypoints and tracks of the SUAV on the map, correctly response to the corresponding operation according to the functions provided by the map, accurately complete various control commands from the ground station, quickly read the data from the storage file and the data analysis by making use of a chart to display various telemetry data. The results verify the valid ground station software system development.