Semi-autonomous control of a quadcopter - Part 2

Abstract

Quadcopter is known as kind of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) which is popular used in recent years world-wide flying robot researches. UAV, as refer from the name, do not have pilot on the vehicle to control it. It could be a semi-autonomous flying machine controlled by the person on the ground through R/C controller, or it could be a total autonomous one which guided by the computer program. Both can help human complete dangerous missions such as military missions and after-disaster navigation missions. In human daily life, these UAVs can also help in taking videos or pictures for people to record their life. With the great demand of different purposes, projects on the UAV tend to be quite necessary. This report is going to summarize the design and the development of the semi-autonomous UAV built by the author in her final year project. The UAV is mainly for indoor navigation in an unknown environment. It integrated first personal view (FPV) cameras and distance sensors for indoor environment detection. The details about the hardware specification design and the software design is included in this report, as well as the calibration and the test result. The quadcopter also represented NTU join in the 2017 Singapore Amazing Flying Machine Competition (SAFMC).