Year: 2000 until now.
Project type: Private R+D project.
Participants: 1 Enterprise.
Throughout the years, CATUAV has designed and built several ground control stations (GCS), both fixed and mobile. The first GCS was nothing more than a backpack with a receiver and all required electronics, a hat with a directive antenna that was oriented by turning the head and SONY glasses designed in the 90’s to watch DVDs from which the user could get real time video data to pilot the system in First Person View (FPV).
Later we had the first mobile GCS towed with a lawnmower tractor, which integrated a tube TV and a portable PC. With that rudimentary single place GCS we made a distance record of 15 km in 2003.
However, that first GCS was not street legal and that is why we decided to make a much better one mounted on a motorcycle trailer, this time with two places, one for the pilot and another for the drone operator. With two monitors inside, the pilot can see at the same time the real time video link and all the telemetry data (drone position in a map, velocity, altitude, battery statu…), being able to operate the system as if he was on-board the drone. From that GCS, which is still operational nowadays, we have made thousands of commercial flights and has travelled several thousands of kilometres around Europe.
As a fixed GCS for the BCN Drone Center we build a four seat system with three computers and five displays, which is currently the one we use most. It has one position for the pilot, one for the flight operator and two for flight engineers, allowing to properly analysing all drone data while performing test flights. This system is very flexible and allows us to adapt to the needs of our current fleet and also to the systems used by all other test site users.