Mission planning of iOS application for a quadrotor UAV

Development of civilian UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) applications has become possible with the progress of electronics and information technologies. In addition, smartphones have rapidly gained popularity and become very important due to the simple operability and mobility. Under such a background, there is a need to have an easy and flexible way to control a UAV using such a smartphone. The authors already developed basic handlers to enable an operator to remotely control a quadrotor and monitor its surroundings using an iOS device. The basic handlers were implemented for obtaining compass information, controlling a gimbal, autopilot function for return. In this paper, following and circling around functions while gazing a moving object are first developed. Then, another promising function called the mission planning is additionally designed and implemented to allow the quadrotor to execute a self-flight task using global positioning system (GPS) information. As a result, the iOS application enables the quadrotor to achieve complex tasks. The functionality of the developed software is evaluated through experiments using a quadrotor and an iOS device.