Development of GPS Transceiver for Quadcopter-based Emergency Locator Beacon

Air transportation allows us to translocate the logistics and humans across islands, oceans, and even continents. In addition to these benefits, risk factors in the form of accidents are generally followed by disconnection of communication between aircraft and air traffic controllers. In that case, we could search an emergency locator transmitter to find the location where the accident occurred. However, such signal is vulnerable to fire and shock caused by an aircraft accident. This paper proposes a prototype of global positioning system (GPS) transceiver for quadcopter based emergency locator beacon. A quadcopter equipped with a GPS transmitter, accelerometer sensor, and ATmega128 microcontroller could be put in a special place on the aircraft. The quadcopter will work or be activated if the accelerometer sensor detects an impact or sudden drop in height. While, a GPS receiver equipped with a Visual Basic 6 based desktop application was developed to detect the location of quadcopter. Experimental results show that the GPS receiver managed to detect the location of the quadcopter and convert GPS data into satellite images in real time through an application developed on the GPS receiver.