Build your drone and fly

In phase 1, phase 2 and phase 3, a controller, a path finder and a trajectory generator have been implemented based on a quadrotor simulator. It is time for you to test your work on real quadrotors. In phase 4, you will be divided into 10 groups and every group will be provided with a quadrotor, which is equipped with a DJI N3 autopilot and a NVIDIA TX2 mini PC. Every group needs to implement your work on the NVIDIA TX2 and achieves your quadrotor with the ability of hovering and following a designed path stably.

Tutorial

This controller has a little difference with that one in phase 1. Thanks to DJI N3, your quadrotor has already had a good performance in attitude control. The phase 4 controller only needs to transfer desired and true states to attitudes and thrusts of quadrotor, with an assumption that quadrotors can reach the desired attitudes immediately. Despite this difference, this controller also needs to control quadrotor to hover and follow designed paths.

Hovering and Trajectory Tracking

Three assignments are required for phase 3. They include:

  • TAs will teach you how to assemble a small quadrotor, which will be used by your group until the end of this lecture. So you not only need to assemble it but also have to maintain it.
  • Your quadrotor should be able to hover at a hovering point.
  • Your quadrotor should be able to track a pre-generated trajectory, you can generate the trajectory offline and hard-code the polynomial coefficients into the C++ file. You will get a bonus if you can generate the trajectory online. It's very difficult, but if you used the second method of the minimum snap algorithm in the previous project, it might be much easier to be implemented on C++.

    • The reference software structure:

    The reference drone:

    refrence software

    To install and setup the system, you can refrence to: TX2-setup and installROSTX2.

    Most softerware you need is in ELEC5660_lab_code. But there maybe some new version have not been merged. You can check and use the newest version. Some of them are: djiros, mocap_optitrack , calib_image_saver, pos_vel_mocap, trajectory_node .

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