Autonomous UAVs: a system architecture perspective
The autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) drone market is growing at a fast pace, with applications including maintaining security, monitoring assets, providing an Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) function in the defence industry [10], facilitating rapid logistics [7] [8] and providing passenger services with Urban Air Mobility (UAM) [9]. How are autonomous UAV systems designed, allowing the drone to fly without a human pilot? What components are required for an autonomous UAV system? This article gives a brief overview of the system architecture for a battery-powered electrical copter-based UAV system. An autonomous UAV drone system often follows the Drone Flight Stack architecture as shown in Figure 1. This graphic shows three major parts: the UAV Drone, the Communications…