Redundant Telemetry Link System for Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles

Abstract

Thanks to their flexibility in research, prototyping, and development, Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAV) are seeing increasing use in agriculture, healthcare, logistics, and other industries. With the increase in the use of UAV in civilian sectors, comes an increase in the possibility of errors in telemetry connections. Issues with the telemetry connection may be catastrophic and cause accidents and crashes and may also adversely affect the performance of the subsystems connected to the telemetry. In this study, a low-cost software-based redundant telemetry link system for UAV is proposed. The proposed system minimises the received packet loss using packet deduplication and is compared with a dynamic link switching method. In the proposed system, both fault tolerance and robustness are introduced into the UAV telemetry link. The analysis is performed using the ArduPilot UAV Simulation environment as a producer and a Golang implementation of the proposed methods.