Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Flight Path Control System Design

Because the automated control flies the UAV and completes a variety of related tasks and UAV have following advantages of Safety of zero casualty, low-energy, effective utilizations, easily control and so on, UAV is highly valued and used extensively in all country and walks. Especially USA has taken good use of UAV in fields of military, civilian, the protection of the environment and scientific research. USA has various UAV, such as the most advanced Predators and Global Hawk combat UAVs in the world, Big Crow UAV for surveillance of birds, civilian Yhana UAV and so on. China has attained certain accomplishment in developing UAV, so China has skilled upper air high-speed Xianglong and Anqian Battalion UAV, multi-purpose Qianzhong UAV, Tianjiao UAV for Detection of ocean, Mifeng UAV for communications relay and so on. In the future, In the wake of fast-developments of new and high technology in modern industry technology, information technology, automation techniques and space technology, Drone technology will be more maturation and its performance will be increasingly improved, so Drone has a wonderful prospect.In order to make ensure that UAV can complete various missions effectively, developers have developed various technology flight control systems to achieve the control of UAV during taking off, flight control, landing and relevant task operation. The most basic and core of the flight control system is the control of the fight path of UAV, and all the other control task is based on the control of the fight path. Now there are various flight-path control systems for UAV, but most of these systems has several disadvantages, for example the operation in some systems is complex and not intelligent, some systems where UAV is controlled in the sight-distance range limit the use of UAV seriously, some systems are specialized and not apply to the most of the types of UAV, some relatively consummate system is expensive and so on. For these problem, the design plan of flight-path control system that is low-cost, remote monitoring, Intelligent, efficient, adaptability is put forward.The system is comprised of ground control system and UAV controlled system. Implementation of the system is described as follows. UAV controlled system transmits its location information to ground control system endlessly in real time. location information is visually displayed to operations staff by electronic map in ground control system. Operations staff draw scheduled flight path by mouse combining with the mission. Ground control system automatically deals with the charting path to get available data frame that is used to control path and the data frame is transmitted to UAV controlled system. UAV controlled system combines data frame with location information to get information for flight control by which UAV is remotely controlled to fly along scheduled flight path. In addition, Ground control system also has some more function that scheduled flight path and historical flight path are stored, queried, replayed in map so that users can view and analysis historical data to get valuable information.The software design of ground control system based on GIS is realized through Visual Basic development environment, MSComm serial communications technique, Mapx second time develop technology, Winsock network interface technology and Access database technique on Windows operating system, that achieve wireless communication with UAV controlled system, GIS system operation, monitoring, Historical data stored, reproduced. Electric map of experiment region has been drawn by Mapinfo Professional develop software. The image of the 2.3D vector electric map is concise and the electric map is attached to height information creatively. Improved offset ratio method and minimum R value method are used to optimize and process path drawn. The high accuracy position information of the flying process in the moment is realized by BDS-2/GPS double satellite system in UAV controlled system. Two serial ports MCU is used to operate and control. The information of flying control is counted by algorithm of space position and displayed by LCD. Low-cost bidirectional communication between two systems is realized by wireless broadcasting station and GPRS technology under the wide area.The research significance is embodied as follows:(1) Both hardware and software of the system are implemented by interface and modular manner. It is easy to improve based on this system now and embed the other task control systems. So the system has widely suitability. The system can apply to UAV flight-path controlling in all areas, such as scientific research, military training, aerial photographs, Wire patrol, pesticide spraying and so on;(2) Map on which the UAV real-time location information is displayed in a manner of point in ground control system and scheduled flight path and historical flight path display realize multifunction system that contains monitoring, controlling and inquiry;(3) UAV don’t need pilot operate in it. When a flight mission need to been implemented in the danger zone, operation staff just stay far away securely and reliable control the flight of UAV under monitoring clearly by ground control system;(4)With the above statement of number 3, pilot is omitted. less money is spent in the long run. And tedious work is completed at high speeds by system automatically so that system is high accuracy and efficiency;(5) Both monitoring and controlling is strong real-time. Operation staff can get location information at any time and give instructions to control and change the flight of UAV.