Robust Communication Protocol Improves Drone Experience

So you have your expensive drone in the sky and want streaming video to your pilot, the camera operator, the client’s tablet and the client’s girlfriend’s laptop. That’s a lot of signal for the drone to transmit, not to mention the signal it expects to receive from the pilot. Not all signals are the same.

Thus, DJI has applied for a patent for “cyclically repeating time division multiplexing”, an oscillation of “I’m listening” and “Here are some images!” dialogue with the drone. This way, the flying instructions are never in conflict with the stream of data the drone is up there to collect.

Here is the relevant text from the application: “An uplink is primarily responsible for the transmission of control data from a base station or a remote control device to the UAV, for example, to achieve real-time flight attitude control of the UAV and/or command automation. The downlink, on the other hand, is primarily responsible for the transmission of telemetry data, image data and other data from the UAV to the base station or remote control device. […] [A] method for wireless communication between a first terminal and a second terminal is provided using a plurality of cyclically repeating time division multiplexing (TDM) frames, each comprising a plurality of subframes. The method comprises transferring, at a first data bandwidth, uplink data from the first terminal to the second terminal while using a first subset of the plurality of subframes, the uplink data encoded using a first coding scheme; and transferring, at a second data bandwidth that is different than the first data bandwidth, downlink data from the second terminal to the first terminal while using a second subset of the plurality of subframes, the downlink data encoded using a second coding scheme, the second coding scheme being different than the first coding scheme.”

Claim 26 is the first independent claim, which means that the application has already been Examined, and this claim is the new and improved Claim 1:

A remote controller for controlling an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), comprising:

• an uplink transmitter configured to transmit uplink data to the UAV, the uplink data including control data for controlling operations of the UAV;
• and a downlink receiver configured to (1) select a working frequency channel from a plurality of frequency channels by measuring one or more quality characteristics associated with each of the plurality of frequency channels;
• and (2) receive, using the selected working frequency channel, downlink data provided by the UAV.

Title: “DATA COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS AND METHODS”

US Patent Application Publication No: 20150171956

Filed (China): September 26, 2013

Published: June 18, 2015