Design, Fabrication And Test Of An Embedded Lightweight Kinematic Autopilot (Elka)

Purpose - Unmanned vehicles flight is controlled by embedded circuits in the aircraft, under the remote control of a pilot on the ground. This circuit, called autopilot, represents one of the key elements inside the vehicles. The authors developed one of the smallest autopilot, specifically designed for low-weight low-power applications. The paper aims to discuss these issues.Design/methodology/approach - The system is based on STM32 ARM Cortex M3 microcontroller. It includes an onboard 9 DOF IMU (MPU9150) and a 2.4 GHz wireless transceiver (nRF24L01 +).Findings - The embedded lightweight kinematic autopilot (ELKA) can pilot up to eight servomotors, and can be used to monitor more than 100 sensors. The final assembled board is 28 x 21mm(2) and weighs around 1.2 grams (battery excluded), and has successfully passed initial functionality tests.Originality/value - The authors presented the design, fabrication and initial tests of a lightweight kinematic autopilot (ELKA board version 1.0). The system has been designed in order to upgrade the state-of-art capability in sensing and processing over a previous autopilot (GINA), which is of similar weight and size. The small size (28 x 21mm(2)) and the lightweight (around 1.2 grams) make ELKA one of the smallest autopilot in the world.