Paper Authors

Abstract

NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract

Development of a PC- Controlled Autonomous Aerial Robot Abstract

The currently employed autonomous aerial robot uses a complex system of GPS(Global Positioning System), INS(Inertial Navigation System), pressure meter, and so on. Also, the aerial robot carries the control algorithm in FCC(Flight Control Computers). However, in the case of a small aerial robot or MAV(Micro Air vehicle), it is impossible to load these bulky payloads due to the physical limitations. Therefore, this research sets its objectives on making the simplest and smallest autonomous aerial robot. For this project, we tried to build a PC-Controlled Autonomous Aerial Robot. The project provides an opportunity for the high school student to perform a broad range of engineering activities with guidance of trained graduate students.

Introduction

The Sejong University is developing a PC-Controlled aerial robot that can fly autonomously. The aerial robot is practically equivalent to a radio-controlled(RC) plane, except the aerial robot has a ground based PC for the autonomous flight along the preset course while taking positioning signal by the on board GPS receiver and Bluetooth devices. A PC-to-RC circuit adopted in this research provides a bridge between the control software implemented on the PC and conventional RC transmitter. With this configuration the aerial robot is about the simplest autonomous aerial robot possible. This simplicity makes it easy for students unfamiliar with autonomous aerial robots to understand the system, keeps the system cost low, and allows the existence of a truly miniature autonomous aerial robots. The simplicity also provides engineering challenges, such as navigating using only the infrequent sensor data from the GPS. Graduate students from the department of Aerospace Engineering are participating in this project, conducted over 10 months. While selected high school students are participating as interns funded by Korea Research Foundation(KRF) with the intention of attracting scientific talent students into the mechatronics engineering fields. The project has required students to perform a broad range of engineering activities, and to document their work well enough for succeeding classes to continue the work. The goal of the project was to create an autonomous aerial robot using a commercially available GPS receiver as its sole sensor. The single sensor arrangement has two main advantage : low cost and ability for miniaturization. Miniaturization is an important goal for groups like armed force, whose desire for a backpackable unmanned vehicles lead to the DARPA MAV program, which created aircraft no larger than 6 inches in any dimension and required extensive miniaturization work1. This paper will describe the PC-controlled aerial robot, its control algorithm and electronic assembly, as well as the educational uses it has been.

Aerial Robot System

(1) Aircraft The model aircraft used in this research is a miniature vehicle (Overall length: 720mm / overall width: 1,000mm / weight: 350g). In order to prevent damages caused by the novice controls of the students the aircraft was built with EPP(Expanded PolyPropylene) material. For the

• Citation

• Format
  • APA
  • APA - LaTeX bibitem
  • MLA
  • MLA - LaTeX bibitem
  • Bibtex
  • EndNote - RIS

Hong, S. K., & Hong, M., & Hong, Y., & Hwang, J. (2008, June), Development Of A Pc Controlled Autonomous Aerial Robot Paper presented at 2008 Annual Conference & Exposition, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 10.18260/1-2--3637