Design of an U.A.V. controller based on the open source platform Arduino

This paper focuses on the preliminary implementation and performances assessment of an unmanned aerial vehicles (U.A.V.) controller. Although not showing any innovative technical aspect of the automatic flight control, it underlines the simplicity of building a complete low cost unmanned aerial vehicle starting from a commercially available Ardupilot Mega board, telemetry modules and a G.P.S. sensor. In order to assess the reliability of this product some experimental flights have been performed and the relevant measured and processed data show an acceptable behaviour. The open source nature of this product represents a revolutionary aspect of this technology allowing an impressively fast understanding and developing of these autonomous systems. This approach is especially applicable to research and academic environments