Drone ground control station with enhanced safety features

Abstract

'Drone Ground Control Station' is a system for controlling and monitoring Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) or Drone from any remote place. In existing nonmilitary drone ground control stations, the software can only present the telemetry data and control parameters from drone, which do not ensure the safety of an on flight drone from crashing due to bad weather and other facts. Moreover, the software and the control unit of these ground control stations are not customizable. This paper is about a drone control station which incorporates a hardware system for establishing secured communication with drone and a software for presenting the telemetry data as well as the important weather parameters and no fly zones of a region in which the drone will fly. A microcontroller is used in the hardware unit for central controlling of the ground control station. It is possible to interface any customized physical control unit like joystick with the ground control station software. The communication between drone and the ground station is established by MAVLink, a widely used communication protocol for drone. The proposed design of the system was tested by several dummy and real test flights of drone, which makes it reliable for using in any nonmilitary drone operations.