Discussions

Hello all,

I am currently working with a team at CSU Fullerton to design and implement a UAV system. We are designing just about everything: from the airframe and related systems to the onboard image processing capabilities and more. At this stage in the design, I've run across a bit of a road block that I'm hoping you folks can help me clear. 

The ordeal is this: onboard our UAV, we will have two computers running. One will be the APM (we have my personal v2.0 for testing right now, hoping to have a 2.5 or later for the final vehicle), and the other will be a small ARM based embedded computer. We are investigating options for data link with the vehicle while in air, and I have to figure out communications for both computers. 

We need to have the ability to send and receive data to the APM. I need to have telemetry data, and I need to be able to adjust the flight plan mid-flight. I also need to communicate with the computer, to receive imaging data and to manage 802.11 wireless connections from out in the field (yes, I'm serious, and no, I didn't make that one up). Ideally, I'd like to get away with one radio, as I'm limited in the power I can provide to the payload systems. At first I thought I could run the mission planner software on the onboard computer and then use RPC/SSH or the like to control it and send data, but our ARM computer will be running a stripped down version of linux. I could always go the other way, and try to funnel my image data through the telemetry radio/APM, but I feel like that may not be a very good way to go about that much data transfer.

So the big questions are:

I've heard about using MAVlink instead of the usual mission planner software. Does MAVlink offer a way to receive data from the APM and command it from linux?

What's the best way to approach having an adjustable flight plan/bounding box/search area with hard restrictions?

Also, if you have any ideas on a wireless comm system with decent bandwidth at range (less than a kilometer, line of sight, and I'm shooting for 100-500 KB/s) I'm all ears. 

Thanks in advance!

-JB