Developing Low-Cost Hardware Navigation Module for UAVs

Abstract

This paper describes developing process of a lowcost navigation module especially designed for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles(UAVs). Currently various low-cost sensors are available, and its performance is sufficient to be utilized for navigation system of UAVs. The main advantage of adopting low-cost navigation module is that total cost of a flight control system can be reduced significantly while maintaining high performance of sensing. This low-cost navigation module can be highly desirable for multi-agent UAV systems. Developed navigation module has small size (50 x 50 mm) and light weight (17.5 g). It offers fifteen states including three axis angular rates, attitudes, linear accelerations, linear velocity, and position with very high update rate, 500 Hz, and filter execution time is less than 0.4 msec.