tubbz-alt / d4-itchen

D4 design exercise: Build a UAV in 2 weeks

D4 Design Exercise: ITCHEN

This design exercise was run during the second year of university. We were tasked to design and build a UAV capable of stable flight and delivering a payload in just two weeks. This is a git repository of the final product that was submitted.

Team Congo

• George Brown (Team Leader)
• Rhys Thomas (Communications)
• Tom Darlison (Motor Control, Pilot)
• Adam Melvin (Simulations, PID Tuning)
• Felix de Neve (Remote Decoding)

Our drone was able to fly continuously for 10 minutes and lift a maximum payload of 1kg. This exercise was a competition between ourselves and 9 other groups, of which we placed 1st!

The documentation for the final product can be found at https://rhthomas.github.io/docs/itchen.

The brain of the drone was an Arduino Leonardo. This processed the PID control loop computations, and adjusted the speed of the motors accordingly in order to keep the drone stable. Sensor data was read from an IMU on a separate Arduino Pro Micro and sent to the Leonardo over UART.

The drone was controlled with an Xbox 360 controller, the joystick data of which was decoded by a Raspberry Pi, then sent to an Arduino to transmit the set-points to the drone.