Design of an embedded multi-antenna satellite data acquisition system based on ARM-Linux

The Global Positioning System (GPS) can provides high-precision positioning information. The GPS information of multi-antenna satellite data is acquired for attitude measurement. An embedded multi-antenna satellite data acquisition system is designed in this paper. This system adopts binary protocol of GPS receiver. Compared to the NMEA protocol, the binary protocol can acquire more comprehensive raw data such as pseudo range and signal-to-noise ratio for satellite navigation. The hardware of the system is based on AM335x ARM Cortex A8 microcontroller and consists of four GPS receiver unit (NV08C-CSM). The software of the system is based on the embedded Linux operating system and the multi-channel data acquisition programs are designed. The experiments were conducted many times. The results show that the system provide GPS raw data properly for attitude measurement, which meets the requirements of precision. The size of the hardware platform is small (10×10cm) and easy to apply in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), Unmanned surface vehicles (USV), etc.