Miniature Low-Cost Bandwidth Efficient Advanced Modulation (BEAM) Transceiver for Small Uninhabited Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)

The proposed Phase II effort will be focused on designing, implementing and testing a high-speed, low-cost, low-power, miniature modem capable of downloading and displaying high resolution, full motion digital images from UAVs in real-time. The modulation and coding technology used for this link will be compliant with the draft military standard for the BEAM waveform (MIL-STD-188-181C). The proposed Phase II development will validate the research results achieved in the N03-183 Phase I SBIR by providing a fully characterized and flight-tested prototype system. The video communication link will be two directional, allowing a ground based operator to configure and control a video camera and elements in the communication link in real-time. The communication protocol will be based on the Internet Protocol (IP). External interfaced will be Ethernet based. This approach allows the use of standard COTS products for both the video camera and video display elements of the system. It also enables the video communication link to be part of a larger IP-centric communication network that can be extended to other elements within the UAV payload, as well as other networked UAVs.