Avionics subsystems design and development for HALE UAV ITB V4

In this paper, avionics subsystems as well as its integrations for High Altitude Long Endurance (HALE) UAV ITB V4 is presented. There are several factors that must be considered in designing & selecting electronics for HALE UAV such as environment, mission, and airframe factor. These factors create the Design Requirement and Objective (DRO) of the electrical components. The avionics subsystems consists of power supply subsystem, flight control subsystem, communications subsystem, and video subsystem which will be discussed in this paper. The power supply subsystem uses Lithium-Ion batteries as the avionics power source. The flight control subsystem uses the ArduPilot flight control firmware and the Pixhawk “Cube” 2.1 flight controller hardware. The communications subsystem is used for telemetry, radio control remote, and video transmission with the ground control system (GCS). The video subsystem is used to help the pilot control the UAV with First Person View (FPV) features.