International Journal of Emerging Technology and Advanced Engineering

Website: www.ijetae.com (ISSN 2250-2459, ISO 9001:2008 Certified Journal, Volume 5, Issue 4, April 2015)

Automation in Air Traffic Control using ZigBee and

Ultrasonic Radar
Nandini Ammanagi1, Yogesh Prajapati2, Hardeep Purswani3, Milesh Janyani4, Atharva Nandurdikar5
1
Assistant Professor, 2,3,4,5 UG Student, Department of Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering,
Vivekanand Education Society Institute of Technology, Chembur, Maharashtra, India
Abstract— This paper is mainly proposed for automation in
monitoring system of air traffic and avoidance of aircraft
avionic accidents. In recent years, lots of air-plane crashes
were happened because of poor weather conditions, false
Degree of Freedom[9] and miscommunication between
ground station operator and pilot. Therefore to replace
human intervention by introducing automated system to
provide safety and secure runway along with advanced
monitoring system this prototype has been developed[2].

Keywords— Air Traffic Control (ATC), Accelerometer

sensor, Degree of freedom, Light dependent resistors (LDRs),
Micro-controller, Thermistor, Ultrasonic radar sensor, Visual
basic, ZigBee.

I. INTRODUCTION
The Air Traffic Control (ATC) tower is located in or
near the aerodrome and usually has visual contact with
aircraft. Tower may consist of a local controller, a ground
control and a clearance delivery. The local controller is
responsible for all traffic within the control zone and on the
runways, the ground controller for all traffic on the
taxiways. In case no delivery exists ground takes up this
duty. If there is only a local controller he has all duties
including clearance delivery and ground control. On non-
controlled airports the tower is normally called Info. Info is
not allowed to instruct pilots, but may provide all kind of
information and especially traffic information to the pilot.
In certain cases there are many avionic accidents
because of bad weather, temperature variation around the
aircraft, false degree of freedom and also due to
miscommunication between the base station operator and
pilot which results into big air crash accidents. This can be
due to lack of training, poor radio protocol, insufficient
availability of parameters about running aircrafts and due
to squelched messages or wrong information which may
also cause runway incursions while landing[1]. The degree
of freedom also known as critical flight dynamics which
includes yaw, roll and pitch is explained in the figure
Figure 1: Degree of Freedom [10].
• Imagine three lines running through an airplane and
intersecting at right angles at the airplane’s center of
gravity.
• Rotation around the front-to-back axis is called roll.
• Rotation around the side-to-side axis is called pitch.
• Rotation around the vertical axis is called yaw[9].
Therefore, to observe the body axis force ie.,yaw, roll,
and pitch accelerometer is used and also to make the
maximum data available at the base station controller using
intelligent wireless system which reduces the manpower
and air traffic congestion this paper has been proposed[3].
Thus, by making use of wireless technologies like Zigbee
to transmit and receive the signals from both plane and
ground station. Ultrasonic RADAR is used to analyze and
detect the signals coming from the plane and to detect the
obstacle providing the details of clearance area an
automated system is achieved[1].
II. NETWORK ARCHITECTURE
The entire prototype can be divided into two modules:
 Aircraft module
 Base or Ground Station Controller (ATC) module

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 International Journal of Emerging Technology and Advanced Engineering
Website: www.ijetae.com (ISSN 2250-2459, ISO 9001:2008 Certified Journal, Volume 5, Issue 4, April 2015)
The Aircraft module consists of the circuit to be
mounted on the aircraft along with various sensors and its
block diagram is shown below
Figure 2: Block Diagram of Aircraft module
The block diagram of base station controller module is
shown below:
Figure3: Block Diagram of Ground station controller (ATC).
III. DESCRIPTION OF BLOCK DIAGRAM
A. AT89s51
The whole system is microcontroller-based and we have
used microcontroller AT89s51. The AT89S51 is a low-
power, high-performance CMOS 8-bit microcontroller with
4K bytes of In System Programmable Flash memory[8].
The device is manufactured using Atmel’s high-density
nonvolatile memory technology and is compatible with the
industry- standard 80C51 instruction set and pin out.
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The on-chip Flash allows the program memory to be
reprogrammed in-system or by a conventional nonvolatile
memory programmer.
Figure 3: PIN Diagram of 89s51[8].
B. VISIBILTY
For the visibility purpose LDRs are used. The LDR
(light sensor) is connected so that the plane LED lights
when the LDR is in darkness. The variable resistor adjusts
the brightness at which the transistor switches on and off.
This basically shows the principle of how to detect the
presence of fog and poor weather conditions [5].
C. Power Supply
There are many types of power supply. Most are
designed to convert high voltage AC mains electricity to a
suitable low voltage supply for electronic circuits and other
devices with rectified output. For AT89s51 to work which
has an operating voltage of 4- 5.5 V.The output of this
power supply is given to the rectifier circuit to adjust the
polarity used through the rectified circuit to obtain a
constant DC supply of 5V.
 International Journal of Emerging Technology and Advanced Engineering
Website: www.ijetae.com (ISSN 2250-2459, ISO 9001:2008 Certified Journal, Volume 5, Issue 4, April 2015)
This power supply is also used to provide for ZigBee
module which is mounted on the aircraft through which the
serial data transmission takes place towards the ZigBee of
the base station and the reception of data is done.
D. ACCELEROMETER SENSOR
Accelerometer sensor measures static (earth’s gravity) or
dynamic acceleration in all three axes. Accelerometer
sensor measures level of acceleration where it is mounted
this enable us to measure acceleration of object like
aircrafts or tilt of a platform with respected to earth axis[9].
Figure 4: Accelerometer Sensor[9]
E. THERMISTOR
A thermistor is a type of resistor with resistance varying
according to its temperature It will be used to determine the
temperature around the aircraft surrounding.
F. ULTRASONIC SENSOR
It is also called as Distance sensor. Used to identify
whether the runway is safe before landing the flight. It
consists of a set of ultrasonic receiver and transmitter
which operate at the same frequency. When something
moves in the area covered by the circuit the circuit’s fine
balance is disturbed and the alarm is triggered and obstacle
is detected[7].
Figure 5: Ultrasonic Radar Sensor[7]
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G. ADC 0808
The ADC0808, ADC0809 data acquisition component is
a monolithic CMOS device with an 8-bit analog-to-digital
converter, 8-channel multiplexer and microprocessor
compatible control logic. The 8-bit A/D converter uses
successive approximation as the conversion technique. The
converter features a high impedance chopper stabilized
comparator, a 256R voltage divider with analog switch tree
and a successive approximation register. The 8-channel
multiplexer can directly access any of 8-single-ended
analog signals.
F. ZIGBEE
Xbee24b ZigBee is a specification for a suite of high-
level communication protocols used to create personal area
networks built from small, low-power digital radios.ZigBee
is based on an IEEE 802.15 standard[10]. Though its low
power consumption limits transmission distances to 10–100
meters line-of-sight, depending on power output and
environmental characteristics. ZigBee devices can transmit
data over long distances by passing data through a mesh
network of intermediate devices to reach more distant ones.
Figure 6: ZigBee Module
IV. SOFTWARES PACKAGES
After the hardware is ready there needs to be software to
control the working of the hardware and to show the display
.Two software packages that were used for the project are
described below.
A. PL2303 USB-to-Serial Prolific Driver
PL2303TA provides a convenient solution for
connecting an RS232-like full-duplex asynchronous
serial device to any Universal Serial Bus (USB) capable
host. PL2303TA highly compatible drivers could simulate
the traditional COM port on most operating systems
allowing the existing applications based on COM port to
easily migrate and be made USB ready without having to
rewrite the COM port software application.
 International Journal of Emerging Technology and Advanced Engineering
Website: www.ijetae.com (ISSN 2250-2459, ISO 9001:2008 Certified Journal, Volume 5, Issue 4, April 2015)
By taking advantage of USB bulk transfer mode, large
data buffers, and automatic flow control, PL2303TA is
capable of achieving higher throughput compared to
traditional UART (Universal Asynchronous Receiver
Transmitter) ports. When real RS232 signaling is not
required, baud rate higher than 115200 bps could be used
for even higher performance. The flexible baud rate
generator of PL2303TA could be programmed to generate
any rate between 75 bps and 6M bps.
B. Visual Basics
This software enables to have display unit at the base
station on computer system. Making proper GUI (Graphic
User Interface) will help us to display all the parameters
and also to display any warning messages in case of any
parameter getting exceeded out of its desired range.
Programming in VB is a combination of visually arranging
components or controls on a form, specifying attributes and
actions of those components, and writing additional lines of
code for more functionality. A programmer can put
together an application using the components provided with
Visual Basic itself. Programs written in Visual Basic can
also use the Windows API, but doing so requires external
function declarations.
The GUI of Visual Basics for ATC is shown in figure
below and it will also plot the real time graph for better and
convenient understanding to the base station operator
Figure 7: GUI of ATC in VB.
We need to select the proper com port for both radar and
data. Once the PL2303 prolific driver has been installed,
this com port can be identified by opening the device
manager and checking the serial-to-usb port and select the
com port number between 1 to 4 different for both radar
and data[4].
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V. WORKING PRINCIPLE
A. Aircraft Module
The circuited mounted on the aircraft consists of IC
89S51 which serves as a controller for the whole circuit.
The other important parts of the aircraft module are ADC
for clock generation, Zigbee for data transmission and
reception, and LCD display for displaying performance
parameters. Proper connections to the pins and other major
circuitry leads to optimized performance of the system.
This air plane module consists of four sensors viz,
Accelerometer, Thermistor, Visibility sensor and Tacho-
generator etc[2]. The accelerometer gives information
about performance parameters of aero plane which are
confined in three categories Roll, pitch, and Yaw. Visibility
sensor states the visibility condition for the aero plane. It
senses the weather condition and gives appropriate reading.
Tacho-generator is for the measurement of speed of the
aero plane. The aero plane’s speed while landing can be
measured with the help of Tacho-generator. All these
sensors fetch runtime values from the airplane module.
These values are then sent to ADC for binary conversion.
Binary data is processed by micro controller 89S51. This
data is displayed on the LCD display after proper
calibration and then sent to the base station by the
transmitter Zigbee module. Also a buzzer circuit is also
provided for emergency purpose. Suppose if any sensor
detects parameter value which has exceeded a threshold
value, then the buzzer immediately starts blowing. This
sound along with a blinking LCD indicates a warning
message to the pilot.
B. Ground Station Controller Module
The base station consists of the RS232 serial port USB
connection joined to the computer. This USB port is
equipped with a receiver Zigbee module. The receiver
fetches the signal transmitted by the aircraft module. This
signal is then converted to a suitable format in the USB
itself. These signals are sent to computer where the Visual
Basic software classifies the data sent by different sensors
in a separate fashion. The VB application displays all the
runtime parameter values on the computer and plots them
with respect to time. Similarly, there is one more sensor
present at the base station which is nothing but ultrasonic
proximity sensor. This sensor is used for aircraft landing
system. When the aircraft is about to land on the port, this
sensor gives information of whether the runway is vacant
or not. It also gives the distance of airplane from the
nearest obstacle lying in its path[7].
 International Journal of Emerging Technology and Advanced Engineering
Website: www.ijetae.com (ISSN 2250-2459, ISO 9001:2008 Certified Journal, Volume 5, Issue 4, April 2015)
The warning message displayed to pilot in aircraft VIII. PRACTICAL IMPLEMENTATION
warning is also displayed on the base station software,
which shows how much an aircraft has exceeded the
desired value of its performance parameters and other
factors .Then the base station controller gives appropriate
commands to the pilot to get the plane back to its optimum
performance.

VI. CONCLUSION
Thus by encompassing all the problems of obsolete ATC
systems, the enhanced automated ATC system helps to
minimize the error and the problem although increasing the
efficiency in flight scheduling procedure, safety by
avoiding collisions, time accuracy to the Air traffics all
over the globe. Also use of Zigbee Module in Place of
heavy radar system will be helpful in reducing the
complexity as well as the maintenance of the system. Due
to the transmission of the aircraft parameters to the base
station leads to major improvement in Aircraft safety. The
use of the ground based Ultrasonic radars will help in safer
landing of the flights and thus avoiding collision.

VII. FUTURE SCOPE

This project can be combined with the Instrument
Landing System for more safety while landing on runway .
The addition of new capabilities in order to support
improvements in efficiency and productivity by automating
more functions and by introducing features that make it
possible to take advantage of improvements in avionics and
other newly available technologies. Apart from this, the use
of Satellites could also be used for aeronautical navigation
and surveillance. Singly or in constellations, satellites with
accurate sensors and computing capabilities can be used to
determine aircraft position and relay the information to the
other aircrafts and ground stations[8].
Figure 8: Practical Implementation of ATC using ZigBee and
Ultrasonic radar.
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