Low Cost Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Monitoring Using Smart Phone Technology

We present and demonstrate an innovative and extremely low cost aerial monitoring and surveillance platform based on integrating open source and small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) with a highly capable compact, lightweight smart phone. We investigated sensors available within smart phones such as the camera, GPS, gyroscope and accelerometer, to integrate computing and sensing capabilities to the UAV in an extremely cost-effective way, which could fundamentally affect the way UAVs are used in emergency response and other applications.