A UAV development platform for intelligent applications

To date, many UAV systems have been developed worldwide to operate at locations where access proved difficult, such as disaster zones, with the final aim being object transportation, inspection, identification, and mapping among others. In this respect, in recent years various researches have been done to develop aerial robots that have led, in turn, to many different types of UAV systems with varied kinds of structures, capabilities, and final scopes. In this research, we propose a UAV development platform for intelligent applications. Exactly, it enables fast real-time implementation and testing of various types of algorithms that are deployed either at the level of the flight management unit (e.g., algorithms for UAV command and control), on the companion computer (e.g., algorithms used to track, to identify or to classify different targets), or deployed on the base station. This open development platform requires full access to the source code of all these: the flight management unit, the base station, and the embedded system. Moreover, the hardware components and how they communicate must be specially designed to be easily replaceable with ones specially adapted to the application requirements. Also, the paper proposes new innovative and inexpensive solutions to have a better, and a more reliable system able to work as much as closely to real environments (e.g., an urban one).