Data acquisition and processing of the onboard sensor system of a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle

In recent years, quadrotor helicopter has become a hotspot of the research about unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The data acquisition of the vehicle's attitude and position in real time is important to achieve autonomous flight control for quadrotor UAVs. In this paper, an ARM embedded system is employed as the main controller, and an attitude heading reference system (AHRS) is utilized as the main onboard sensor. By using C++ programming under Linux operation system, the data acquisition and processing of the AHRS is implemented, and then the attitude and position data of the quadrotor UAV are obtained in real time to provide reliable flight state information for the autonomous flight control. The on-board flight data is sent to ground control system and stored via a communication module based on the UDP network protocol.