The Embeded Flight Control System for UAVs

In the Future, the UAVs require enhanced capabilities, like long range cruising, reconnaissance, avoiding dangerous obstacle and tracking moving targets, tolerating unpredicted flight conditions, communicating with other UAVs. Cross-platform commonality to simplify system integration and new system development is also desired. A reconfigurable embedded flight control system (FCS) has been developed and tested. It employs system on programmable chip (SOPC) technology to satisfy the requirements for more advanced vehicle behavior in a small package, light weight, and low power consumption. The soft kernel processors and other programmable function units in SOPC enable variable custom interfacing and high performance parallel data processing. This paper focuses on the design aspects of the hardware and the software of the FCS.