Enhancement of GPS signals for automatic control of a UAV helicopter system

Abstract

In this paper, we present an enhancement scheme for global positioning system (GPS) signals received on an unmanned aerial-vehicle (UAV) helicopter system. Because of the limitation of the hardware units and the GPS system, parts of the signals are discontinuous and have huge jumps from time to time. Such a problem degrades a great deal the overall performance of the automatic flight control system of our UAV helicopter. We employ in this work an Kalman filter technique together with a complementary filter to regenerate smooth and accurate signals that can be used for the implementation of automatic flight control systems. Our simulation and implementation results show that the proposed scheme is very effective and yields a good improvement on the performance of the overall flight control system of our UAV helicopter. © 2007 IEEE.