Architecture and preliminary experimental results of an UAV avionics system

This paper presents the preliminary results obtained within a project aiming the development of an aircraft with autonomous navigation capabilities (UAV). In particular the first phase of the project is focused on the design of the avionics architecture devoted to flight data collection. On the other hand, the second phase of the project concerns with the implementation of the Guidance, Navigation and Control functions (GNC). The designed avionics system can be adopted in both the project phases, even if, at the moment, the results are only obtained by post-process analysis of data collected during ground and flight tests. The performed tests are related to the comparison of several navigation techniques involved in the position estimation by GPS receivers. Despite to the greater accuracy achievable with carrier phase techniques, the comparison concerns only techniques mainly based on GPS code, since they satisfy the required navigation performances in terms of accuracy, continuity and integrity.