Improving communication between unmanned aerial vehicles and ground control station using antenna tracking systems

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) are used in inspections on critical infrastructure such as oil, gas, water, pipelines, power networks, dams, monitoring crop vegetation status in precision farming, forest fires, and rescue operations. The paper presents a method to continuously maintain the Line Of Sight (LOS) between a Ground Control Station (GCS) and an UAV in order to improve the geo-reference accuracy of the acquired data. This need arose under a research project for monitoring the crops vegetation status when the UAV communicates with the GCS during the data acquisition process. For solving the problem, two pan-tilt modules Antenna Tracking Systems (ATS) were attached on UAV and GCS. They are controlled by a microcontroller development board, so that to keep the LOS between UAV and GCS.