Scalable and Autonomous Air Traffic Control for Quadcopter Drones

Abstract

An Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) is necessary for the safe and efficient operation of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) in shared airspace. A UAS is comprised of a UAV, a ground based controller for the UAV, and a means of communicating between the two. Currently there is no commercial UAS that can be used by hobbyists or the commercial sector, which is concerning given the dramatic increase of drone usage in recent years. The technical requirements, infrastructure and standardization required for such a system to be implemented at scale far exceed the scope of this thesis. Instead, we explore a subset of topics that concern building a UAS - specifically in security, communications, and systems engineering - by designing and building a small yet effective hobbyist-UAS network. We designed ground control stations that can monitor, route and securely communicate with registered drones in a given area. We outfitted two custom-built quadcopter drones with onboard computer for testing with our ground control stations. In the end, all designed devices were able to communicate with each other and cooperate to create a viable UAS that met most of our target objectives as outlined in Chapter 1. There still remain some inconsistencies in our system that can limit its effectiveness in non-ideal conditions. Otherwise, the system performs as expected and described.