Ground-Based Remotely Piloted Aerial Vehicle (RPAV) Tracking System

Drone Delivery Canada (DDC) designs and operates high performance Remotely Piloted Aerial Systems (RPAS) to deliver payloads between depots and warehouses. The DDC engineering department is looking to design and deploy a ground-based system to track and point at the Remotely Piloted Aerial Vehicle (RPAV) during flight in real-time. However, DDCâs RPAS must be able to operate in remote areas making the use of communication technology infrastructure difficult due to the need to be able to have communication between the RPAS and ground control station (GCS) over long distances without the use of communication relay nodes or heavier, more powerful communication modules on the RPAV. To solve this challenge, advanced communication equipment such as high-gain antenna(s) will be needed in addition to novel antenna tracking algorithms for the system to be interfaced with the GCS to receive telemetry data from the RPAV. The end product is a robotic tracking system which applies positional feedback data from the RPAV (such as altitude and GPS location) to a control system to dynamically point an antenna at the RPAV throughout flight. Review of existing literature on tracking systems and required infrastructure/resources would be performed to guide the design process. TO BE CON’T

Faculty Supervisor:

Kamran Behdinan

Student:

Siu Hong (Thomas) Leung

Partner:

Drone Delivery Canada

Discipline:

Aerospace studies

Sector:

Transportation and warehousing

University:

Program: