A multiplatform on-board processing system for miniature unmanned vehicles

This paper presents a low cost, high powered onboard processing system for miniature unmanned vehicles (UVs), especially unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs). Such vehicles have shown great potential due to their compact size, high maneuverability and high payload-to-size ratio. The proposed on-board processing system differs from other existing designs by utilizing developed commercial off the shelf (COTS) hardware and a full, nongraphical, operating system (OS). The hardware allows for quick development and deployment of the on-board processing system as well as easy integration with new hardware. The full OS allows for simplified software development and testing as well as the use of commercial and open source software. The physical configuration of the system, necessary drivers, and field tests on both aerial and ground vehicles are presented