Transformational Perceptive of Data Recorder for UAV Flight Automation Control System using Image Processing Techniques

Abstract

Flight Data Recorders (FDRs) are readily available in the market, to be used on the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) for onboard data recording. They have their own inbuilt sensors and characteristics and can be easily placed within the cockpit of the UAV. However, they have umpteen drawbacks. They do not have sufficient sampling rate for rapid and accurate flight automation, are either very bulky, or do not incorporate some of the necessary sensors required for post-flight analysis and are very costly. Hence, the need arises where the FDR needs to be designed to suit the requirements. We go about designing one such FDR. Our FDR incorporates a MicroStrain’s 3DM- GX1 Gyro Enhanced Orientation Sensor, a Texas Instrument’s GPS module and four servo motors each controlling the rudder, elevator, ailerons. The data from these devices are interpolated to increase the sampling rate and are simultaneously stored into a Secure Digital (SD) / Micro Memory Card (MMC) during the flight of the UAV. Greater sampling rates allow more rapid and accurate flight automation. SD/MMC cards allow faster and efficient data retrieval for post flight processing. Our FDR is designed to be compact, cheap and overcomes most of the drawbacks mentioned above. Therefore, we call this FDR as Smart Data Recorder(SDR).