Development of Autopilot system of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle for Aerial Mapping Application

Abstract

The Autopilot of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) is a system with the capability of controlling roll, pitch, and yaw of UAV. It also capable to maintain the altitude of UAV automatically. Moreover, it assists UAV travel according to the waypoints and take-off/landing automatically. The features of Autopilot become important to support UAV tasks such as aerial mapping activities, territorial monitoring, and tourism documentation. The paper presents development of GPS-based UAV autopilot system that has several flying modes: (1) stabilize (user manually controls the movement of the aircraft using remote controller, the balance of the aircraft is automatically maintained by the autopilot), (2) automatic (the aircraft automatically flies along the waypoint), (3) take-off/landing (the plane lands and takeoff automatically). The proposed system is developed using Arduino Mega 2560 as the main controller to acquire sensor data, control the roll, pitch, and yaw of the plane, calculate the heading of the plane, and obtain the signal control to the servo motors. The sensors consist of an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) of MPU 6050 type, ultrasonic, barometer sensor of BMP 180, magnetometer, and GPS. The system uses Proportional Integral Derivative (PID) controller to maintain the position of the plane (roll, pitch, and yaw) and the altitude. Landing mode uses ultrasonic sensors to measure the altitude of the aircraft when the altitude is less than 3 meters. The proposed system has been successfully implemented and tested. The maximum error during waypoint mode is 50 meters.