Flight Data Acquisition System for Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Flight investigations of aerodynamics and flight dynamics for micro-UAVs and mini-UAVs stimulate us to use automatic data acquisition systems to obtain valid estimations for UAV performances and characteristics. There exist many kinds of microprocessor-based and microcontroller-based data acquisition systems but all of them do not satisfy specific requirements of UAV flight tests. A Flight Data Acquisition System (FDAS) is suggested to provide support for flight data gathering and registration processes. This FDAS consists of microcontroller-based flight data recorder equipped with SD/MMC memory card to store experimental data, set of sensors to measure UAV flight parameters and software utility providing experiment planning, processing and visualizations of recorded data. Some examples related to UAV flight tests are presented and discussed to demonstrate features of the proposed approach.