Initial design of flight data acquisition unit (FDAU)

Flight investigations of aerodynamics and flight dynamics for a small unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) demand the usage of automatic data acquisition system to support valid estimation of UAV aerodynamics and flight performance. All subsystems consist of commercial hardware component and popular component in the market. The system is low weight, low power, small in dimension, and low cost. The feature of this FDAU is nine degrees of freedom (9-DOF) inertial measurement unit (IMU) with 3-axis accelerometer, 3-axis gyroscope, and 3-axis magnetometer, global navigation satellite system (GNSS) and storage device. FDAU combines a large variety of sensor streams into a unified state data stream that is recorded for later aerodynamic analysis. This FDAU works by taking data from IMU sensor and GNSS, converts the signal to the correct level and filters the signal analog using signal conditioning, and then the data is switch-selected, connecting one channel at a time by multiplexer. The data is converted using converter (analog to digital or digital to analog signal), before it is processed by central processing unit (CPU) to generate become values who indicated a many flight parameter also to process with Kalman Filter, and then data is recorded by storage device. The results of this research show that the initial design of FDAU can record 13 different flight parameters. Not only that by using Kalman Filter concept, but the quality of resulting data is also better than the raw sensor data, from there the data has been successfully stored in the storage device with spreadsheet format.