The Development of an FPGA-based Autopilot for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

This work is part of an on-going research project at Virginia Commonwealth University in the field of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The purpose of this thesis project is to port the previous generation of UAV autopilot from the Atmel FPSLIC platform to the Xilinx MicroBlaze platform in order to provide a test-bed that will accommodate future research projects. The tasks include porting the software from the AVR processor located on the FPSLIC to the MicroBlaze processor and implementing the hardware peripherals in Xilinx FPGA.The UAV equipped with the new autopilot can autonomously navigate through pre-defined waypoints and transmit the collected data back to the ground base station for analysis