A quadrocopter automatic control contest as an example of interdisciplinary design education

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have many applications and quickly gain popularity with the availability of low-cost micro aerial vehicles (MAVs). Robotics is a popular interdisciplinary education target as it involves understanding and collaboration of several disciplines. Thus, UAVs can serve as an ideal study platform. However, as robotics requires technical background, skills and initial efforts, it is commonly applied in long-term courses. In this paper we successfully exploit the opposite case of robotics in short-term education for students without background, in form of a one-day contest on automatic visual UAV navigation. We provide an extensive survey, and show that existing material and tools do not fit the task and lack in technical aspects. We introduce a novel open-source programming library that comprises programs to guide learning by experience and allow rapid development. It makes contributions to marker-based tracking, with a novel nested-marker design and accurate calibration parameters estimated from 14 Parrot AR.Drone 2.0 front cameras. We show a detailed discussion of the contest results, which represents an extensive user study regarding robotics in education and the effectiveness of the library. The achievement of a steep learning curve for a complex subject has important implications in interdisciplinary design education, as it allows deep understanding of potentials and limitations to facilitate decision-making, unconventional problem solutions and novel applications.