Conceptual design of a low cost flight data acquisition system for analyzing flight behavior of small unmanned aerial vehicles

Abstract

This paper represents a conceptual design of a flight data acquisition system for small scale unmanned aerial vehicles. The system consists of three components-the unmanned aircraft, data acquisition hardware and display. The acquired data from various sensors of the acquisition system are stored in on board storage device and the data is essential for achieving situational awareness of the control of the UAV and post flight analysis for improved system behavior, accidents investigation, aerodynamics design improvement etc.