Architecture of an autonomous mini unmanned aerial vehicle based on a commercial platform

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) have been getting much more important in the last few years. At the civil market the interest focuses on smaller so called Mini Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (MUAV), in particular on Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) capable systems. Electronical stabilization in conjunction with a GPS based position hold, makes it possible that the operator can switch his focus to different tasks without causing the MUAV to crash immediately. But for many scenarios a higher grade of autonomy is desirable. At the European market electronically stabilized VTOL MUAV systems are available in good quality from different manufacturers. These systems are developed for remote controlled operation, but it is possible to use those systems as base for an autonomous MUAV. This paper shows the modifications that have to be done on the commercial MUAV, and shows the resulting hardware and software architecture.