UAV School Project



Here is a quick vid of my final project I'm building in electrical engineering. It's a tricopter UAV with thrust vectoring. As of now I have implemented roll, pitch stabilization, yaw and height are controlled by the aircraft. I just control the x and y movement.


All the control algorithms use fuzzy logic. Why? To be different... and to overcome a lot of the limitations associated with PID's and nonlinear processes.


The craft has 3 motors, and 5 servos. The front two motors can pitch forward and backward as well as tilt side to side. The rear motor can only tilt side to side. This allows the aircraft to gimbal around with out having to have translational movement (in theory). The goal is to have the platform as stable as possible for photography so the servos are needed to thrust vector. (It may have been easer to have a floating camera mount...)


I use two dsPIC33s for the computer and a XBee Pro for data transfer. Both chips are running at 80MHz, one handles all the low level control while the other is for higher level control/communications. Eventually it will be used for path planning/ object avoidance etc. But now it just mainly handles communications and reading the GPS data.

 

More videos of it during the development stage are also on my youtube page.

 

Enjoy

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Comments

  • Great! What kind of ESC are you using?
  • Are you using Simulink for your control design, or writing C code by hand? I was wondering if you know the kind of overhead you get in that case, e.g. what's your CPU usage so to speak.
  • maybe you should work on your attitude control algorythm first before you go for altitude hold

    it's very unstable

    how fast is you control loop?

     

    check out some videos of arducopter, it has only one 16Mhz cpu for flight AND navigation

  • You're right.   A "floating" camera mount would have been easier, but it's a degree.
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