Design and implementation of a ground control station of a rotary wing unmanned aerial vehicle

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) are the pilotless air vehicles which are commanded and controlled by an operator or autopilot. UAV systems have an important place in today's aviation industry. Around the world, significant investments are made in order to develop these systems which have increasing usage. Because of its function, Ground Control Station (GCS) is the brain of the UAV system. In this study, a GCS that creates flight mission plan and loads it to small scaled Rotary Wing UAV (RUAV), processes the data received from RUAV and sends control instructions, created according to these data, to RUAV is designed and implemented. Also a camera system is included in order to get image from RUAV. While testing GCS software, instead of using simulation of sensor outputs, SONAR, static/dinamic pressure sensor, voltage-current sensor, GPS, IMU, telemetry modem, power board, NI 9870 RS-232 module, NI 9213 Termocouple module and a processor and FPGA based card that collects sensor outputs and command/control processes are used. All the hardware is assembled in a way which occupies the least volume. Sensor outputs are received from GCS by wireless communication and visualized by using the indicators supplied by Google Earth, GMS and LabVIEW. Also flight mission plan and control data created by the operator are sent to RUAV by the same way. A graphical programming language, LabVIEW is used to develop all the software which has been prepared for these processes. Hardware and software which are designed and implemented in this study can also be used in large scaled RUAV?s.