Versatile UAV hardware platform for accelerating indoor aerial navigation research

Abstract This study presents a bespoke hardware platform for indoor navigation, featuring a quadrotor equipped with an FZ3 card incorporating the AMD (formerly Xilinx) Zynq UltraScale+ ZU3EG MPSoC as the onboard computer. A core component of this platform is a field programmable gate array (FPGA) module specifically designed to efficiently compute Delaunay triangulations, enabling enhanced spatial awareness and real-time surface reconstruction. The onboard computer communicates with the flight controller, inertial measurement unit (IMU), ultra-wideband (UWB) localisation system, stereo camera, light detection and ranging (LiDAR) and ultrasonic sensors via robotic operating system (ROS) 2. The primary objective is to develop a cost-effective, modular unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) system that can be adapted for a range of indoor navigation applications. The modular design supports different onboard computer platforms and sensor configurations, allowing researchers to easily customise the system for various experiments. By providing a practical framework for precise indoor navigation, this platform addresses the limitations of simulated, simplified laboratory setups, accelerating prototyping and supporting the deployment of UAVs in complex real-world environments. This work explores the UAV’s hardware architecture, the implementation of the Delaunay triangulation core on the FPGA system-on-chip (SoC), the ROS 2-based communication system and includes a detailed mass analysis and power estimation.