Methods for monitoring and controlling multi-rotor micro-UAVs position and orientation based on LabVIEW

The multi-rotor micro-UAV has become an important platform for assessing crop information promptly given its high flexibility, compact size, low cost, and high spatial resolution. However, considering the limits of the stability of the micro-UAV control system and the precision of automatic navigation systems, how to timely adjust the position and attitude of UAVs to ensure the target within the scope of monitoring is one of the key techniques which determines whether micro-UAVs can be widely used in precision agriculture as a remote sensing platform. In this study, the integrated navigation system of INS/GPS (Inertial Navigation System/Global Positioning System) and EKF (Extended Kalman Filter) was adopted as the navigation system and fusion algorithm for simulation analysis respectively, to monitor the position and attitude of UAVs more accurately and thus improve the estimation accuracy and control precision. An autonomous flight experiment was designed and carried out, and experimental data collected by commercially available UAVs. LabVIEW was used to analyze and process all experimental data and outputted flight state graphs, which reflected the optimization effect of EKF algorithm and control precision visually. Keywords: Multi-rotor UAV, navigation system, position and attitude estimation, data fusion, LabVIEW DOI: 10.33440/j.ijpaa.20180101.0009 Citation: Pei S Y, Wang S Z, Zhang H H, Zhu H.  Methods for monitoring and controlling multi-rotor micro-UAVs position and orientation based on LabVIEW.  Int J Precis Agric Aviat, 2018; 1(1): 51–58.