Towards guidance chip for micro aerial vehicles

Autonomous aerial vehicles need to navigate as well as control themselves in real time without any human intervention. This requirement imposes an immense pressure on the processing powers as well as the accuracy of sensors used for navigation. Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) have payload and power constraints that prohibit use of highly accurate sensors and powerful processors. This paper presents implementation of an attitude and heading reference system (AHRS) using low cost Micro Electro Mechanical System (MEMS) sensors and Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). This hardware implementation of AHRS has enabled us to achieve attitude update rate of 20.0 micro seconds necessary for high speed control loop with power consumption of 110 mW. The target FPGA used for this work is Xilinx Spartan III x3cs1500 which provides sufficient logic for implementation of AHRS algorithm. The work presented here is the first step towards a dedicated guidance chip for MAVs that will be able to navigate as well as control an MAV autonomously. Simulation and hardware implementation results were compared with Crossbow's AHRS400 which show that the design is suitable for implementing AHRS for MAVs and small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs).