Development of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) system

• Main Author: Yu, Chor Liang.
• Other Authors: Xie Lihua
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2011
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Electrical and electronic engineering::Control and instrumentation::Control engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/45998
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) becomes significantly important in military and civilian domain and normally preferred for mission that is dangerous and impossible for manned aircraft. The author shall first review the past and present control method to make autonomous flight possible particularly for altitude control and position control. With limited payload for carrying sensor and computational power on-board, development of UAV autonomous becomes a challenging task. The report aims is to come out with a UAV platform design which can perform target sensing and navigation. The UAV system architecture consists of hardware and software portions. The UAV platform used in this project is quadrotor (VTOL) with APM processor, IMU shield, Zigbee, Blackfin camera and ultra sonic range finder onboard. On the software side, Arduino 0022 is used as the programming tool. PID controller is used to achieve autonomous flight and PID parameters are determined through data collection from experiments. Performance of PID controller will be discussed lastly.