GSM Technology as a Communication Media for an Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are becoming more reliable, autonomous and easier to use with great potential for commercial use in common airspace in the near future. Though autonomous UAVs often do not rely on communication links with the ground during flight, communication is necessary and essential in accomplishing complex mission tasks where the ground operator is an essential part of the mission. Communication links become especially important in cooperative missions where tasks are solved using many vehicles of different sizes and characteristics (ground or airbourne) with different sensor suites. Data links, such as wireless Ethernet or radio modems that use open frequency bands are often unreliable in urban areas due to interference from other users, spreading and reflections from terrain and buildings, etc. GSM and its related technologies GPRS, EDGE, 3GSM offer an interesting communications infrastructure for remotely accessing, controlling and interacting with UAVs in an integrated and highly portable manner and offer the ability to interface to the WWW for additional information useful in mission achievement. This paper describes a case study of feasibility of using such technologies for UAV operations. A prototype network is presented, that was created between two UAVs and a ground operator using GPRS technology. Experimental results describe performance and reliability of the network. A graphical user interface for a Sony Ericsson P900 mobile device was designed and implemented using Java. It provides the ground operator with a portable control interface for a UAV and its camera. It also receives telemetry data (e.g. position, altitude, state, etc.) from the UAV in addition to an image stream from the camera. The results show that GSM network infrastuctures provide a useful means for communicating with UAVs, especially in urban areas. The proposed solution can be used as a complementary data link to improve robustness, reliability and range of the communication channel. These techniques have been tested in actual flight.