Development of autonomous drone for multipurpose functions
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Date
2018-06
Authors
Sim, Kai Sheng
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Abstract
Autonomous drones can carry out functions such as emergency aid delivery, parcel delivery or
inspection works with the help of global positioning system (GPS) location tracker, along with
sensors for object avoidance. This thesis provides understanding of UAV and the mechanisms
that work together to enable its flight, elaborates the different functions that the autonomous
drone is designed to carry out, performs flight data analysis from flash logs on Mission Planner
(MP) and Google Earth, and discusses how different objectives – including building the UAV
model by considering suitable hardware, object avoidance using HC-SR04 or Maxbotix
ultrasonic sensor with Arduino IDE, real-time GPS tracking of drone with Ardupilot (APM)
software – are achieved with the current state of technology. The drone uses Raspberry Pi (RPi3)
as the processor and a stackable flight controller, Navio2 by Emlid to control its flight. Navio2
is a well-documented, latest developed flight controller (FC) by Emlid, with an array of built in sensors to assist through different autopilot missions. Advanced Inertial Measurement Unit
(IMU) feeds real time flight data to the processor as well as the Ground Control Station (GCS).
Global Navigational Satellite System (GNSS) receiver accepts satellites’ signal to pinpoint
location of UAV, assist the UAV’s flight over waypoints (WP) in auto modes, and override
inaccurate flight parameters through Extended Kalman Filter (EKF). With an external 915
MHz radio telemetry in place flight data can be monitored from GCS even without the need of
a Local Area Network (LAN) connection. The drone utilises a 12-channel AT10-II RC
transmitter and receiver pair by RadioLink Electronics to enable manual or semi-autonomous
control and initiation operations of autonomous mode. A reliability study of the drone is carried
out based on failure tree and criticality analysis. The drone is successfully set on mission on
GPS tracking and path planning in autonomous mode and is able to respond to obstacles in the
object avoidance mode with suitable pitch and roll values based on detected distances.