An Embedded Real-Time System for Autonomous Flight Control

Unmanned Autonomous Vehicles (UAV) represent an attractive solution for those monitoring applications in hazardous environments, where direct human intervention is difficult or impossible to achieve. Small autonomous aircrafts represents a convenient possibility for monitoring large areas, for example for detecting fires and following their evolution. Controlling such systems, however, is very challenging due to the limited resources available onboard and to the high number of constraints, including weight, space, time, energy, and cost. This paper presents a real-time flight control system for an autonomous aircraft model. The control system runs on an embedded hardware platform that includes the microcontroller, the sensors for navigation and environment monitoring, the power management circuit and the wireless communication system. The applications is implemented on top of a real-time operating system suitable for embedded microprocessors, which manages a set of concurrent activities dedicated to sensory acquisition, flight control, communication, and resource management (including energy).

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