Design, fabrication and test of an embedded lightweight kinematic autopilot (ELKA)

Abstract

Purpose

Unmanned vehicles flight is controlled by embedded circuits in the aircraft, under the remote control of a pilot on the ground. This circuit, called autopilot, represents one of the key elements inside the vehicles. The authors developed one of the smallest autopilot, specifically designed for low-weight low-power applications. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Design/methodology/approach

The system is based on STM32 ARM Cortex M3 microcontroller. It includes an onboard 9 DOF IMU (MPU9150) and a 2.4 GHz wireless transceiver (nRF24L01+).

Findings

The embedded lightweight kinematic autopilot (ELKA) can pilot up to eight servomotors, and can be used to monitor more than 100 sensors. The final assembled board is 28×21 mm2 and weighs around 1.2 grams (battery excluded), and has successfully passed initial functionality tests.

Originality/value

The authors presented the design, fabrication and initial tests of a lightweight kinematic autopilot (ELKA board version 1.0). The system has been designed in order to upgrade the state-of-art capability in sensing and processing over a previous autopilot (GINA), which is of similar weight and size. The small size (28×21 mm2) and the lightweight (around 1.2 grams) make ELKA one of the smallest autopilot in the world.

Citation

Petricca, L., Hrishikeshavan, V., Ohlckers, P. and Chopra, I. (2014), "Design, fabrication and test of an embedded lightweight kinematic autopilot (ELKA)", International Journal of Intelligent Unmanned Systems, Vol. 2 No. 2, pp. 140-150. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJIUS-10-2013-0022