Team members:
- Shirley Choi
- Bejan Hafezzadeh
- Joseph Kaiser
- Sean Norwood
- Itay Tenne
A long-term research project is currently in progress to perform subterranean mapping using co-operative helicopters holding a long wire acting as an antenna.
Our team's objective will be to create a generic communications interface board and a generic communication protocol to achieve a modular avionics system. The goal for our capstone project is to use this avionics system and a simple LTI controller & model to get a model RC helicopter to hover autonomously (or augmented control). If time permits, we would like to perform data logging for system identification, which may be used in a sophisticated compensator and estimator.
The helicopter has 4 main components (all commercial parts) which we will try to get to communicate with each other:
- Flight computer (compensator & estimator)
- Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) (Position and Orientation sensor)
- GPS (Position sensor)
- RC receiver (Feed forward or reference input) and RC Servos (Actuators)