Welcome to Senior Design Project 7: Falcon - Quadrotor Flight Control System

Final Presentation

Project Overview:

We will be creating a generic flight control system for quad-rotor aerial vehicles with capabilities specifically engineered to meet the requirements for the OSU Robotics Club's entry in the 2011 International Aerial Robotics Competition (IARC). IARC requires the vehicle navigate indoors, often in close quarters. To compete, our flight control system will be designed with performance, stability, and versatility in mind. It will employ high bandwidth, high resolution MEMS sensors and fast control systems in order to maximize stability performance.

While our boards are designed with IARC in mind, they will be generic and available for other high end quad-rotor vehicles.

Through this year we will produce three circuit boards and the associated software which, together, form a complete flight control solution. Our three modules will be the:

The Flight Control Unit (FCU) integrates input from the Inertial Measurement Unit and output to the Motor Controller Unit. It also interfaces with a master controller (already constructed by the OSURC Aerial Team). The main stability control loop runs on this processor at a rate of 1kHz. This board will also provide battery monitoring and emergency stop functionality.

The Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) reads data from MEMS inertial sensors to calculate the angular and lateral motion of the platform. A Texas Instruments Piccolo processor will process sensor data and provides a state estimate to the FCU every millisecond.

The Brushless DC Motor Controller Unit (MCU) controls the speed of the four brushless motors which propel and control the quadrotor. To maximize platform stability, the motor controllers will have a 1khz update rate and 10 bit resolution. They will drive motors up to 20A at 12V and will be easily modifiable to support higher current and voltage motors.

Team Members

• Sarah Cooley - cooleys@onid.oregonstate.edu
• Torben Rasmussen - rasmusto@onid.oregonstate.edu
• Joey Tomlinson - tomlinsj@onid.oregonstate.edu
• Scott Rosenbalm - rosenbas@onid.oregonstate.edu

Project Mentor

• Aaron Moore - Revolution Robotics

Site Outline:

1 Project Overview and Customer Needs
2 Background Research
3 System Requirements and Testing
4 Design Solutions
5 Top Level Block Design

5.1 Motors
5.2 MOSFET Half Bridge
5.3 Motor Controller Power
5.4 Motor Control Processor
5.5 Motor Controller Code
5.6 FCU Power Supply
5.7 FCU Serial to USB
5.8 Flight Controller
5.9 Battery Monitoring Code
5.10 FCU Code
5.11 Accelerometer, Gyroscopes
5.12 Buffer/Active Filter
5.13 IMU Controller Power Supply
5.14 IMU Sensor Power Supply
5.15 Inertial Measurement Unit Controller
5.16 Data Filter Code

6 Testing
7 Project Timeline
8 System Test Evidence
9 Engineering Expo Material

License This project is licensed under the Other/Multiple/Unlicensed

References