Phenox: Zynq 7000 based quadcopter robot

Abstract

We describe our design of hardware and software systems for a quadcopter robot, which we name "Phenox". Phenox is a palm-sized quadcopter robot that can fly fully autonomously without any external controller or supporting systems. In our previous studies, we proposed palm-sized and fully autonomous quadcopter robots. However, in the previous systems, almost all the capability of the CPU and FPGA was used only for autonomous flight, so it was hard to implement additional user applications on the robot. In the design of the Phenox, we adopted the Zynq 7000 Soc, which has dual-core CPUs and an FPGA in one chip, enabling the users of the robot to implement their own application programs on the robot. We describe how Phenox processes images and sound, estimates its position, controls its flight, runs Linux OS and executes the user application programs in combination with open-source libraries such as OpenCV and Julius.