UAV Ground control station

For my masters project i need to create a ground control station for a UAV. It will be controlled by a USB controller going through a program that then wirelessly controls the UAV in the sky. can matlab interface with a USB controller and with some kind of wireless comms device to send and receive live information (including video)? Or do i need to use labview? The UAV itself will probably have an Arduino based control system with some level of autonomy

thanks for the help

[QINGHAI TAN]

hi have u done this? cause im doing it now

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

MATLAB does not supply the general routines that one would need to communicate with a USB controller. I do not know if labview has those routines or not.

However, the chances are high that you do not want to talk directly to the USB controller. Instead, probably what you want to do is talk to a virtual serial port on the USB controller. MATLAB does a decent job of that, provided the manufacturer supplied the appropriate driver (which is pretty common.)

If you are looking at the USB and wireless device as merely a mechanism to transmit commands to the UAV, then that should not be difficult, provided that you do not need to transmit more than one command packet every 40 milliseconds. (This timing is the default in USB 2.0's virtual serial port definition, and although it is possible in theory to dispatch packets more frequently than that, MATLAB does not provide the hook to that functionality.)

A number of people have worked with Arduino systems. They are typically serial command based systems.