Development of an enhanced ground control system for unmanned aerial vehicles

Abstract

We present in this paper the development of an enhanced ground control system (GCS) for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The enhanced GCS provides a more flexible graphical user interface (GUI), such as the Google Map view, the primary flight display view, the task management view, the camera view etc. One of the highlighted features in this paper is the Google Map view, which can download the map tiles to local repository and restore them in the situation of no internet access. This function is impossible in most of the existing ground control systems. The offline Google Map view also provides the waypoint path planning function in a user-friendly point-and-click manner, which facilities the UAVs to fly automatically along a predefined path. Another highlighted feature is the task management view, which provides a user-friendly click-and-go manner to command the UAVs to finish certain tasks.