HiPER-V: A Hi gh P re cision R adio Frequency V ehicle for Aerial Measurements Maqsood Ahamed Abdul Careem, Jorge Gomez, Dola Saha and Aveek Dutta Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering University at Albany SUNY, Albany, NY 12222 USA {mabdulcareem, jgomez4, dsaha, adutta}@albany.edu Abstract—There is a growing interest towards enabling prac- tical, dynamic and agile wireless applications by systems of independent or cooperative mobile agents such as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Such mobile UAVs are often constrained on resources like storage, power and radio capabilities and require accurate position information to facilitate many of these wireless applications. In this paper, we introduce HiPER-V, which is a generalized UAVprototype platform to enable a broad range of applications in wireless communications using a single UAV or can be extended to a swarm of UAVs. We implement HiPER-V by using an UAV, equipped with resource constrained radio devices, and high precision position information available via RTK-GPS modules, achieving a median position accuracy of 3.8 cm. The details of implementation of HiPER-V and its applicability to a wide variety of applications in wireless communications are presented in this paper. With minimal payload and simple software modification, our solution can be ported to any UAV platform and extended to multiple UAV testbeds that enable an array of research in wireless applications using UAVs. Keywords—UAV testbed, UAV positioning, aerial wireless com- munications. I. I NTRODUCTION In this work we introduce a generic, outdoor and mobile prototype platform (namely, ‘HiPER-V’) for wireless commu- nication applications, using a radio-resource constrained UAV with accurate position information. This prototype platform can be extended to larger, multiple UAV based testbeds as required by the specific application. Compared to conventional ground communication nodes, the advantage of using UAVs as flying communication/ monitoring nodes, lie in their ability to adjust altitude, avoid obstacles, and enhance the possibility of establishing line-of-sight communication and broader sens- ing [1]. Often, accurate position information of the UAVs are assumed to be available. Especially, applications that employ swarms of UAVs [2], [3] have more stringent requirement on the availability of accurate position information of the UAVs. Thus, the goal of HiPER-V is to provide a prototype platform with radio enabled UAV with accurate position information, that can be used to implement a variety of UAV testbeds to validate applications in wireless communications. Hence, the UAV is mounted with a radio module (software defined radio (SDR) equipment) to facilitate communication or wireless signal acquisition along with high-precision positioning to enable precise position estimation of the UAV. The system diagram of HiPER-V is shown in figure 1. UAVs may be con- Fig. 1: HiPER-V prototype - UAV is equipped with USRP B205-mini SDR and a high-precision positioning module. A ground station is used for ground flight control, SDR control and high precision positioning using RTK-GPS. trolled in an independent or collaborative manner depending on the requirement, while each UAV might follow a planned or random trajectory. In HiPER-V, automated flight control of the UAV and automated data acquisition from the radio on the UAV is achieved via a ground controller (typically a laptop with a wifi link to the on-board computer of the UAV) which acts as both the flight controller and the SDR controller (detailed in §II). However this platform, is generic, as the design and the software can be easily ported to various types of UAVs with minimal modification. Generic platform: HiPER-V makes no assumptions on the make and the model of the UAV, the SDR, or the specific RTK- GPS board used. The prototype platform is implemented and verified for the Intel Aero Ready-to-Fly Drone [6], mounted with a USRP B205 mini SDR [4], and a sparkfun RTK- GPS module [5]. However, all the software for control and position acquisition is developed using open source software, which can be ported to most make and model of UAV. Precise motion and control of the UAV is achieved via autonomous flight missions, programmable via Dronekit [7]. This allows manual or automatic configuration of the flight path of the UAV from a ground controller. Dronekit is used to develop apps that run on the UAV’s on-board computer to control the UAV, and augment the autopilot by performing tasks that are computationally intensive. DroneKit is compatible with vehicles that communicate using the MAVLink (Micro Air Vehicle Link [8]) protocol which is supported by a majority of the UAV community. The choice of the SDR platform is based on the trade-off between performance (noise floor, bandwidth, sample rate, etc.) and available resources (storage and power constraints). While, we verified the platform with a small form factor, USRP B205 mini [4], larger UAVs can SECON 2019 workshop on Internet of Autonomous Unmanned Vehicles 978-1-7281-1207-7/19/$31.00 ©2019 IEEE