Development and testing of a low-cost instrumentation platform for fixed-wing uav performance analysis

Abstract

The flight data of a fixed-wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) can be evaluated by its designers in order to analyze its performance, to validate the project criteria and to make new decisions based on the data analyses. In this paper, the authors propose the development of a low-cost instrumentation platform capable of collecting the following data: airspeed, orientation and altitude of the airplane, and the current drained by the electric system. Moreover, this paper presents the use of a telemetry system in order to display the flight conditions to the pilot. The system contains a variety of sensors, which were chosen based on their price, applicability and ease of use. After a test flight had been performed, the collected measurements were plotted and analyzed. Having the flight data, a set of flight characteristics might be observed.