Development of an Emergency Radio Beacon for Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Emergency locator transmitters (ELTs) used to locate manned aircrafts are not well suited to find and recover small crashed unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). ELTs utilize an international satellite system for search and rescue (Cospas-Sarsat System), which should leverage its expensive resources to save lives as a priority. Besides, ELTs are too big and heavy to be used within small UAVs. Some of the existing solutions for this problem are based on receivers that detect signal strength, which may be a long and tedious process not suitable for user needs. Others do not have enough range or require radio license and expensive amateur radio receivers. This paper presents an emergency radio beacon specifically designed to locate small UAVs. It is triggered automatically in the event of a crash and allows finding and recovering a crashed UAV in a fast and simple way. It meets not only the required specifications of user-friendliness, size and weight of this kind of application, but also it is a high precision and low cost device. Besides, it has enough range and endurance. The experiments carried out show the operation of the proposed system.