THE FLYING MACHINE

Abhra Ghosh (120102006)

Anmol Ramraika (120102079)
Anubhav Phukan (120102013)
Praanshu Goyal (120102082)
Abstract-
The military use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has revolutionized the task of surveillance
and patrolling. UAVs have become an indispensable tool for the military. As we are step into the golden
age of unmanned flights we witness an increasing amount of research in this field which has led to great
sophistication and innovations in this technology. However being a developing country, India does not
have access to such cutting edge technology.
So, the question we posed for our project was whether a small low cost UAV could be realized
which would be robust enough to support military and commercial/industrial applications. We
postulated that smaller UAVs could serve more tactical operations such as aerial surveillance. Smaller
UAVs, on the order of a couple feet to a meter in size, should be able to handle military tactical
operations as well as the emerging commercial and industrial applications and our project is attempting
to validate this assumption. We considered several different designs of the Quadcopter before we
settled on creating a simple X-configuration Quadcopter for a first realization. The payload of our
Quadcopter design includes a camera and telemetry that will allow us to watch live video from the
Quadcopter on a laptop that is located up to 50 meter away. We have completed 3 hours of successful
flight tests and we have successfully tested all the onboard sensors and the telemetry camera. Our
project has verified that it is possible to build a small-scale low-cost Quadcopter that could be used for
both military and commercial use.
Our most significant problems to date have been an ambitious development schedule coupled
with very short timeline as well as restricted access to advanced materials like carbon composites. Our
prototype’s performance can be increased greatly with the use of carbon-composite materials for the
construction of chassis and the rotor blades. Currently our Quadcopter is stable enough to be used for
surveillance and image processing purpose. We have proven that it is possible to produce a small scale
low-cost UAV that performs functions of interest to the military as well as commercial/industrial
applications.

Concept exploration-
After deciding to build a Quadcopter, we had to decide what electronic elements to use and which
sensors we would incorporate into it. After a lot of research on the web, we found a couple of forums
that discussed open source hardware and software components suitable for making a Quadcopter. Also,
very basic but highly customizable Quadcopter bodies were available that were suitable for us to use to
create our baseline system. The DIYdrones forum and APM developers’ site provided good information
on what was being done in the amateur drone community and gave us a good idea of possible designs
that could be realized for the project. Due to time constraints we were unable to exploit the
unconventional and more ambitious design of quadcopters like the H-copter or the Dead-cat
configuration and so we delegate it to future researchers in the group. This scenario led us to decide
upon a simple ‘X’-configuration Quadcopter as a suitable design for a first effort since, it could perform
intended tasks with sufficient efficiency. As far as the flight-controller part is concerned we settled upon
the following sensors: gyroscope, accelerometer, compass, GPS, barometer and a battery monitor. We
included payload components: a camera and a telemetry system to send imagery back to the ground
station. Furthermore, we would need a control mechanism that would allow flight beyond the line of
sight. We considered two approaches for this. One was to use the camera for an FPV (first-person-view)
flight. A second, rather ambitious approach was to use the on-board GPS for a waypoint navigation
through commands sent via the telemetry link which the Quadcopter would execute autonomously.
Although both of these approaches are necessary for a surveillance purpose device we were only able to
test the first approach due to the range constraint of our on-board camera. We had to realistically scope
our project within the stipulated time, a small team, and restricted access to sophisticated parts so, we
decided to leverage as many commercial components as possible to get the baseline system working as
quickly as possible and then focus on the application part of our problem.

Flight Platform-
As stated before to scope the project within the stipulated time and available technology we rendered
commercially available components for a quick development phase so as to allow us a longer testing and
application validation phase. The entire flight platform can be divided into sections-

i. Frame and landing gear- Cheap and commercially available Q450 glass fibre frame was chosen
for easy maintenance. Soft balls have been used innovatively rather than using fancy landing
gears. Soft balls have good shock absorbing capability and their ease of availability made them
an ideal choice.

ii. Motors, ESC and Propeller- EMAX MT2213 motors have been used over TURNIGY D2826-6 due
to their ease of availability in Indian market. TURNIGY multistar ESCs were used for their well
known use in building multi rotor platforms. Cheap plastic propellers have been used for time
being of dimension 10*4.5, carbon-fibre propellers of similar dimension can be used to improve
the performance in near future.

iii. Power Plant- 12V (Rhino 3700 mA-h 3 cell) Li-Po battery has been used to power the motors
and a separate 9V battery to power the onboard camera. The chosen frame has an integrated
PCB for power distribution which increased the compactness of the entire flight platform.

iv. Autopilot/ Flight Controller- Due to time constraints we restricted ourselves to a commercially
available flight controller instead of building our own flight controller board. We had chosen
Pixhawk over DZI NAZA since Pixhawk uses an open source hardware as well as software which
enabled us to get access to cloned version of original 3DR Pixhawk to reduce cost by 30%.

v. Camera with DVR- Wireless CCTV camera have been used with range of around 40m. The
receiver at the other end outputs analog video & audio data fed wirelessly from camera and
which is then converted to digital using a DVR. The DVR can be connected to a USD to display
live feed from camera.
Pictures-

Frame and Landing Gear-

Q450 Glass Fibre Frame X 2

Motors-
EMAX MT2213 X 4
ESCs-
Turnigy Multistar 20A ESCsX4

Power Module-
Rhino 3700 mA-h 3 cell Li-Po Battery X 1
Flight Controller-
PIXHAWK X 1

GPS Module-
GPS Module integrated with PIXHAWK X1
Propeller-
8045 SF Props (2 CW, 2 CCW) X 2

Camera-
NPC Wireless Security Camera X 1
Flow Control Block Diagram for the project -

APM and Pixhawk-

ArduPilot/APM is a open source autopilot system supporting multi-copters, traditional helicopters,
fixed wing aircraft and rovers. The source code is developed by a large community of enthusiasts.
The ‘Ardu’ part of the ArduPilot name comes from Arduino. The original APM1 autopilot board was
based around the Arduino development environment. It have since outgrown the Arduino environment
and no longer use the Arduino runtime libraries, although it still supports building the ArduPilot for the
AVR based APM1 and APM2 boards using a slightly modified version of the Arduino integrated
development environment. Because it now supports more than just Arduino-compatible hardware (such
as PX4) it is moving from “Ardu” prefix names for the software projects to the “APM” prefix (APM:
Copter, Plane, Rover, etc), which signifies the cross-platform nature of the current code. A timeline
history of ardupilot can be found here.
PIXHAWK is a high-performance autopilot-on-module suitable for fixed wing, multi rotors,
helicopters, cars, boats and any other robotic platform that can move. It is targeted towards high-end
research, amateur and industry needs. As it is an open source hardware the schematic of the board can
be replicated to reduce the cost of readily available pixhawk from 3DR robotics. For more details on
pixhawk click here.

Procedure -
The procedure for building a quadcopter could be divided into two parts as-
i. Frame Assembly- Although good assembly of the frame requires a lot practice and good
craftsmanship it is more or less same for any multi rotor. We referred this link for getting a hang
of the frame assembly. (In this video the author uses NAZA Flight controller but the frame
assembly is quite similar to that of pixhawk but we will provide a different link for setting up
pixhawk).
 ii. Setting up Pixhawk- To setup the physical connections of pixhawk we referred to this link. For
connecting the PIXHAWK to the PC, drivers are available at this link. We faced difficulties with
the firmware on Windows 8 platform, the solution was available here. For flashing the firmware
we followed this link. Due to the proxy setting of IITG network we could not directly flash the
firmware from DIY Drones. We had to manually download the firmware and flash it using the
custom firmware option. All the necessary firmware and software is available here for
reference. For calibrating the sensors we used this reference. For tuning the gain values one
could use this as reference in case a good transmitter was available. Since the pixhawk comes
with pretty good values of the gains so we didn’t feel the need to change these much.

Observations & Results -

A disclaimer: we found out that the auto-tune feature of the PIXHAWK is highly unreliable. It
could lead to the Quadcopter crashing. So we advise that it is better to spend time and manually tune it.

We have successfully tested the Quadcopter for a maximum flight-time of 12 minutes. The flight
is very stable and in the GPS Hold Mode the Quadcopter can even pinpoint it self even in windy
conditions. The range of the Rx/Tx is 800m. This range could not been tested since we couldn’t develop
a flight mode for control beyond the range of wireless camera (we are using FPV flight mode). The range
of the camera’s Rx/Tx is 40m which is enough for flying around a field but insufficient for advanced uses.
The image quality is fair.

These are the videos of our test flights-

link-1

link-2

Challenges-

i. One of the major challenge faced by us was efficient tuning of PID parameters for all the three Roll,
Pitch and Yaw axis. We had to carry out in-house tuning as in-flight tuning was risky and could easily
damage the Quadcopter. To overcome this we planned to paralyse (fix) any two axis and tuned the
Quadcopter for the third axis by making a setup where Quadcopter would be free to move in just 1-
D. The PID parameters could hence easily be tuned for that single axis. For example click here.

ii. A major challenge was calibrating the various sensors namely accelerometer, gyro, barometer along
with GPS module on-board for precise flight control. Some of these required to be in an interference
free environment for accurate calibration. We had a hard time getting the GPS and Magnetic
compass (internal in Pixhawk) to align and calibrate. We solved it by aligning the GPS exactly parallel
to the PIXHAWK. We also realised that we get interference from electrical lines going through the
 surface which leads to mis-calibration of sensors so the Quadcopter had to armed and calibrated on
wooden surface.

iii. We tried to substitute the inbuilt telemetry link of PIXHAWK with our own version using XBee
module but couldn’t integrate the PIXHAWK and the XBee receiver within our development time.

iv. The propellers needed to be balanced before they could be used. So we used tapes to balance the
propellers. Good propeller balancing tutorial can be easily found in Youtube.

v. We also faced difficulties with the ESCs. Pixhawk is not compatible with all types of commercially
available ESCs which we figured out finally. The TURNIGY ESCs used in the design are compatible
with the architecture of Pixhawk and work fine.

Future Scope-
The quad can be used for the following things-
 In search and rescue missions in places where it is risky for humans to reach.
 For aerial surveillance of a large area.
 For rapid delivery of things to particular locations in case of disaster.
 As a delivery system within a city.
 In military combat or as a way to provide aerial view of a particular area.