HiPER-V: A High Precision Radio Frequency Vehicle for Aerial Measurements

There is a growing interest towards enabling practical, dynamic and agile wireless applications by systems of independent or cooperative mobile agents such as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Such mobile UAVs are often constrained on resources like storage, power and radio capabilities and require accurate position information to facilitate many of these wireless applications. In this paper, we introduce HiPER-V, which is a generalized UAV prototype platform to enable a broad range of applications in wireless communications using a single UAV or can be extended to a swarm of UAVs. We implement HiPER-V by using an UAV, equipped with resource constrained radio devices, and high precision position information available via RTK-GPS modules, achieving a median position accuracy of 3.8 cm. The details of implementation of HiPER-V and its applicability to a wide variety of applications in wireless communications are presented in this paper. With minimal payload and simple software modification, our solution can be ported to any UAV platform and extended to multiple UAV testbeds that enable an array of research in wireless applications using UAVs.