An Embedded Architecture for Mission Control of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

This paper presents an embedded hardware/software architecture specially designed to be applied on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). With the advent of emerging civil applications, a class of mini/micro UAVs is emerging. This type of UAVs shares the same limitations as most commercial embedded systems: space, power resources, computational requirements, complexity, etc. UAVs are automatically piloted by an embedded system named "flight control system". Many of those systems are available today, however no system exists nowadays that provides support to the actual mission that the UAV should perform. The architecture that we introduce in this work is specially designed to operate as payload and mission controller in the UAV