Desenvolvimento de uma cabeça sensora para veículos aéreos não-tripulados

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles have been recently the focus of numerous research projects due to the great number of potential civilian and military applications of aerial robots. However, the commercially available electronic systems used in the control of such vehicles are, in general, very expensive, and to import them from foreign countries can be subjected to strong restrictions. In this work the development of an embedded electronic instrumentation system, hereafter called Sensor Head, is presented. The objective is to provide a Brazilian open design that has similar characteristics to those commercially available systems, such that it can be reproduced in other research and educational institutions. The developed system is capable of attitude estimation, and it is comprised by many sensors such as accelerometers, gyros, magnetometers, GPSreceiver, static and dynamic pressure sensors, all of them necessary to accomplish control, guidance and navigation tasks for aerial vehicles. Both the hardware and firmware development processes are addressed, particularly the implementation of a sensor fusion algorithm for attitude estimation. Four sensor fusion algorithms were evaluated in order to choose the most appropriate to be implemented in the Sensor Head. Finally, experimental results are provided in order to show the quality of the developed Sensor Head embedded system.