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Handbook of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles pp 715–748Cite as

Problem of UAV Communications

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Abstract

Unmanned aircraft have been phenomenally successful in military operations, but have yet to achieve widespread civilian use. This is chiefly due to a concern that unmanned aircraft would pose a danger to other aircraft in the air (including manned aircraft) as well as humans and property on the ground. In order to address this concern and ensure an adequate level of safety, the communication link between the unmanned aircraft and the ground-based pilot – the control link–must carry certain safety-critical data and must be extremely robust and reliable. This chapter summarizes the current consensus view (2012) regarding critical data flows for unmanned aircraft systems, control link performance requirements, potential frequency bands that can satisfy the relevant technical as well as regulatory constraints, challenges that must be overcome to ensure reliable operation, and possible data link design principles that could lead to a safe and workable implementation. Both line-of-sight and beyond-line-of-sight (i.e., satellite based) data links are addressed. It will be seen that the challenges are significant, but a safe and workable implementation appears to be achievable through data link diversity and other error correction and error recovery techniques.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Telenergy, Inc., Hood River, OR, USA

    Stephen B. Heppe

Authors
  1. Stephen B. Heppe
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Stephen B. Heppe .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Denver, Denver, Colorado, USA

    Kimon P. Valavanis

  2. School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

    George J. Vachtsevanos

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© 2015 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

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Heppe, S.B. (2015). Problem of UAV Communications. In: Valavanis, K., Vachtsevanos, G. (eds) Handbook of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9707-1_30

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