22nd Congress of International Council of the Aeronautical Sciences, Harrogate, UK, 28 August - 1st September, 2000
Paper ICAS 2000-7.6.3

THE DEVELOPMENT OF A LOW COST NAVIGATION SYSTEM USING GPS/RDS TECHNOLOGY

Y. Lin, W. Lu, M. Yang, F. Hsiao
Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan, ROC

Keywords: unmanned aerial vehicle, global positioning system, radio data system, navigation system

The vast-growing technology development in flight automation, intelligence navigation and control has made the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) playing various roles in military and civil applications. The present paper mainly describes the development of a low-cost navigation system incorporated with the Global Positioning System (GPS) and Radio Data System (RDS) to conduct the autonomous, long endurance flight missions. The navigation system is realized by using an on-board computer system with a real-time operating system to execute the whole missions, which include data acquisition, analysis, storage and communication with a ground station. After many ground and flight tests, the RDS/DGPS system developed here has the capability of real-time data transmission, accurate positioning, low operating cost and wide area coverage.

view full paper