Project:UAV

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

This TED talk gives a good intro to quad rotors. These are small UAVs that use four rotors for easy flight control. This project will design and build a small quad rotor.

Interested Members

If you're interested in working on this please add yourself to the following list:

• NickRyder

Background/Research

There are some quadcopter kits around. These include:

• [1] ($200 kit)
• [2] ($500 kit)

Design

Overview

The UAV needs a flight computer that can determine the UAV's motion and control the rotors to allow the UAV to hover in a stable location and move to desired locations. The flight computer will probably use an accelerometer, a gyro and some range finders to measure the motion and current location. The flight computer will then use this information to calculate and set the required rotor speeds. Additionally the flight computer should have some wireless communication method to receive instructions.

Parts list

These are the kinds of parts we'll probably need:

• Microcontroller to be used as flight computer We could use an arduino or mbed for prototyping.
• 4 small motors
• 4 motor controllers?
• 4 sets of rotor blades
• 3 axis accelerometer chip
• gyro chip
• ultrasound range finder?
• wireless communcation method. An Xbee might be good.
• Mechanical frame

Regulations

There are some regulations about UAV flights that can be found at [3].