The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is growing fast in recent
years from reconnaissance to attack missions. They are increasingly being
used in a small but growing number of civil applications. With regard to
control of UAV, it is quite often that a ground-based control center only
navigates one UAV at a time, and UAV in flight cannot communicate with
each other. In the current stage, simultaneous navigation of multiple UAVs
is still a challenging task. This study implements a multi-mini UAV
navigation system which combines power supply module, flight control
module, video transmission module, video receiver module, video processor
and GPS module, And designed the communication protocol to fulfill the
multiple UAVs navigation and control. Subsequent to the hardware-in-the-loop simulating tests, the field tests have been conducted to verify the functions and performance of the flight control software and the
collaborative mission planning. Preliminary results of real-world flight tests show success of this research.