Development of an Autonomous UAV Platform for Advanced Research Applications

Abstract

In recent years popularity of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) systems has been increased rapidly. There have been various research projects on the robotics and control community on these systems. In this work, a general UAV platform that can be used for education as well as research has been proposed. This system has embedded computers and various sensors such as IMU, camera, LIDAR sensor to implement various control algorithms. To emphasize the usefulness of the system, an embedded visual tracking algorithm has been developed and presented. In experiments, the quadrotor UAV could be able to successfully track the marker under Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) control, with the help of the on-board vision computer.