Autonomous Quadcopter
Intergrating Vision Algorithms and Quadcopters
The Caltech Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Eng ineering Club was founded September 2014. The first two quarters of the 2014-2015 school year were used to raise money and find interested members of the student body. The mission of the club is to foster interest in UAVs, something that has garnered lots of attention in industry these past couple years. The applications of manned and unmanned vehicles have increased exponentially and having Caltech students involved in pertinent projects is the goal of the club.
In order to be able to spend more time on projects, Caltech's UAV club participated in ME100 this past year - a student led class that allows students to explore proposed projects. Our goal for the class was to create a quadcopter that could visually recognize a bright colored object and perform an action based on that trigger. In our case, the goal was to make the quadcopter hover and land when a tennis ball rolled underneath it. The built quad is shown below.
The team made use of a Pixhawk controller to achieve manual and GPS based autonomous flight. After, a Raspberry Pi and Pi camera were integrated into the system to implement our vision algorithms. A full report, including instructions, detailed explanations, and future work can be seen here. The team was able to accomplish all of our goals and milestones besides autonomous take off (with the Pi). If you are curious about the full scope of the project I strongly suggest you browse the report!
My experiences with the club have given me an increased appreciation for quadcopters and their capacities. I have gained valuable knowledge of quadcopter mechanics and components that will certainly be useful for any future work with multi-rotors. Additionally, this project helped stengthen my knowledge in robotic vision and RC systems (ESCs, PDB's, motor controllers, Rx, Tx, etc.)
A video of autonomous flight can be seen below. More videos can be seen on CaltechUAV's youtube page.
- Date: April-June 2015