LinkBoard: Advanced flight control system for micro unmanned aerial vehicles

Abstract

This paper presents the design and development of the LinkBoard, an advanced flight control system for micro Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Both hardware and software architectures are presented. The LinkBoard includes four processing units and a full inertial measurement unit. In the basic configuration, the software architecture includes a fully configurable set of control modes and sensor fusion algorithms for autonomous UAV operation. The system proposed allows for easy integration with new platforms, additional external sensors and a flexibility to trade off computational power, weight and power consumption. Due to the available onboard computational power, it has been used for computationally demanding applications such as the implementation of an autonomous indoor vision-based navigation system with all computations performed onboard. The autopilot has been manufactured and deployed on multiple UAVs. Examples of UAV systems built with the LinkBoard and their applications are presented, as well as an in-flight experimental performance evaluation of a newly developed attitude estimation filter.