Development of Intelligent Ground Control Station and Autopilot Architectures for UAVs and UGVs

Abstract

Multi-rotor Unmanned Aerial and Ground Vehicles (UAV/UGV) are utilized for various military and civilian purposes such as detection, mapping, surveillance, target destruction, observation, and logistical applications due to their high agility, mechanical simplicity, ease of control, and autonomous capabilities. With advancing technology, UAVs and UGVs can be remotely controlled autonomously by onboard computers or by a pilot at a ground control station (GCS). Integrating these onboard computers into UAVs/UGVs enables information flow between the different modules they possess and the GCS. However, due to the traditional processing of this information flow in GCS software studies in the literature, there is a need for different and intelligent GCS software and autopilot design approaches. In this study, an intelligent new GCS capable of remotely commanding and controlling UAVs/UGVs has been designed, equipped with artificial intelligence features, capable of real-time recognition, positioning of more than seventy objects, and communication with UAVs/UGVs. The open-source Java programming language was used for coding operations, and the MAVLink (Micro Air Vehicle Link) protocol was utilized for communication between UAVs/UGVs and the GCS. For real-time object detection and localization, one of the fast and highly accurate algorithms in the literature, SSD MobileNet v2, was used and integrated with the GCS via Flask API. The obtained results demonstrated the consistency between the initial motivation and the software outputs, leading to the development of an open-source intelligent ground control station software and autopilot. © 2024 IEEE.