Development of Night Owl UAV: Embedded Control System for Imaging and Autonomous Flight

The development and implementation of a robust control system for an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) have been presented in this paper. The UAV was designed by the RobEn team at the Arab Academy for Science, Technology, and Maritime Transport. The research presents a compact embedded system that provides several UAV capabilities like flight autonomy, obstacle avoidance, payload delivery, and object detection through the integration of open-source ArduPilot and PX4 frameworks. Additionally, an improved communication system was implemented using the MAVLink protocol and MAVProxy to extend the UAV's capabilities beyond conventional Pixhawk configurations. The system was extensively tested using Software-in-the-Loop (SITL) simulations before real-world deployment. This work contributes to UAV research by addressing critical control and communication challenges, improving system safety, and extending UAV mission versatility.