Development of Autonomous Quadcopter

Abstract

There are many commercially available drone platforms (fixed wing or rotorcraft) but all of them require user interaction through a remote controller. We want to build a swarm of autonomous drones so we built a drone that can fly and hover with no input from a user. We used the CrazyFlie 2.0 as the base platform and then added sensors and made software revisions for it to operate autonomously. We call our drone the Programmable Autonomous Quadcopter (PAQ). We overcame several unexpected issues such as noisy sensor data that disrupted our control loop, slight weight imbalances that cause the PAQ to drift and problems when the battery voltage drops. We also tested the maximum speed and battery life of the PAQ.