Design and Development of Ground Control System for Tethered UAV
This paper designs and develops a tethered UAV ground control system based on Qt environment. Firstly, the framework and main functions of the tethered UAV ground control system are introduced. Ground control system can show the information about the flight status, mode, location and surroundings of UAV in real time through data display module, map control module and aerial image module. Ground control system and flight control system communicate by MAVLink protocol and the location of UAV can be observed in the map control module. Tethered UAV transmits information to the ground station by cable, so it has a faster transmission rate and higher quality of image. Therefore, this paper specially designs the transmission and processing of airborne HD video, and adopts KCF (Kernelized Correlation Filters) tracking algorithm to identify and track moving targets. The ground control system has also realized high speed real time serial communication. A four axis eight paddle tethered UAV is used as the platform and a tracking experiment is carried out. The results show that the ground control system can display information correctly and control tethered UAV to track a moving target.
2019 IEEE International Conference on Unmanned Systems (ICUS)