BOB4 - 1st autonomous indoor flight! - Blogs

I made my first autonomous flight today. I am very happy to achieve this result!

It is only a 30 seconds flight, but 100% autonomous! Lift and landing are still under manual control.

It is not perfect, the control goes wrong after 30 or 40 seconds. I have to work a lot to obtain better results, but this first flight is a big improvement in my project!

Reminder :

BOB4 estimates its position with only its onboard sensors : 4 sonars, one 3D magnetometer, one 6DOF IMU.

The computing is only onboard, without any external aid.

All computation is done on an “Embedded Master” motherboard with .Net Micro Framework.

I have designed this UAV alone. The hardware and the software is 100% home made.

Some pictures :

http://heli.bot.free.fr/

http://www.diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/indoor-uav-3d-position

http://www.diydrones.com/forum/topics/bob4-indoor-autonomous

Leon – French hobbyist.

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Comments

Leon November 14, 2010 at 9:37pm

Carlito : I only filmed this flight. It stopped because of 2 things. First, the battery was almost empty. Second, the control is still quite unstable, and starts to diverge after a certain time. When this goes wrong, I control the drone manually again, to avoid crashing.
I only made 5 flights like this, no more than 40 sec. I still have to improve the control (4 PID).
I have some ideas to improve the control loops, and especially the "observer" part. I will test this in the next weeks.
Patrice Mainville November 14, 2010 at 3:57pm

nice
Carlito Oliveira November 14, 2010 at 3:05pm

very good!
congrats!! why does it stops working after 30 sec?

This reply was deleted.