A control system for an unmanned micro aerial vehicle

This paper presents the development of a PCbased control system for an unmanned micro aerial vehicle (UAV) that has been converted from a helicopter model. The hand-controller of the helicopter model is modified to be a wireless link between a ground control computer (GCC) and the UAV, which carries sensors including an inertia measurement unit (IMU) and the actuators for the main rotor and pitch angle controls. A programming environment, written with the C# programming language, is set up for the implementation of control algorithms for the UAV. Manual and automatic modes of controlling the UAV are achieved. Implementation issues, such as the reliability of the IMU data for closed-loop control, are also discussed.