Controller for a Low-Altitude Fixed-Wing UAV on an Embedded System to Assess Specific Environmental Conditions

Abstract

The use of an appropriate sensor on an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is vital to assess specific environmental conditions successfully. In addition, technicians and scientists also appreciate a platform to carry the sensors with some advantages such as the low costs or easy pilot management. However, extra requirements like a low-altitude flight are necessary for special applications such as plant density or rice yield. A rotary UAV matches this requirement, but the flight endurance is too short for large areas. Therefore, in this article, a fixed-wing UAV is used, which is more appropriate because of its longer flight endurance. It is necessary to develop an own controller system to use special sensors such as Lidar or Radar on the platform as a multifunctionality system. Thereby, these sensors are used to generate a digital elevation model and also as a collision avoidance sensor at the same time. To achieve this goal, a small UAV was equipped with a hardware platform including a microcontroller and sensors. After testing the system and simulation, the controller was converted into program code to implement it on the microcontroller. After that, several real flights were performed to validate the controller and sensors. We demonstrated that the system is able to work and match the high requirements for future research.