Introduction
Recently, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) technology or better known as drone has become increasingly popular among the public and industries. Multirotor drone with four rotor also called as quadcopter. It has been used in many fields in the industry including agriculture, construction, energy, media & creativity, inspection and public safety. The rapid development of UAV technology allows it to operate autonomously and also with the help of human under control of remote. Therefore, it is capable of performing waypoint command functions, return to launch (RTL), Auto Zig Zag function and more. These functions have greatly facilitated human work to carry out area mapping missions, spraying fertilizers or pesticides on agricultural farms, filming and so on.
In this project, I will build a quadcopter that is capable of operating autonomously using the Pixhawk 2.4.8 flight controller with the help of the Ublox M8N GPS module. Mission Planner version 1.3.76 will be used as Ground Control Station (GCS) software to allow operator communicate with the vehicle.
Quadcopter Subsystem and Component
Body Frame
Quadcopter frame is the structure that holds all the components together. It supports motors and other electronics and prevents them from vibrations. There are a lots of quadcopter frame sizes and no thumb rule for size of the frame, but the most common is from 180 mm to 800 mm. Each quadcopter frame with different attributes is designed for different style quadcopter such as fpv / sport racing / cameras / mini etc.
Flight Controller
The flight controller is the brain of the aircraft. It’s a circuit board with a range of sensors that detect movement of the drone, as well as user commands. Using this data, it then controls the speed of the motors to make the craft move as instructed. Nearly all flight controllers have basic sensors such as Gyro (Gyroscopes) and Acc (Accelerometer). Some flight controller include more advanced sensors such as Barometer (barometric pressure sensors) and magnetometer (compass). The flight controller is also a hub for other peripherals, such as GPS, LED, Sonar sensor etc.
Radio Transmitter and Receiver Communication Subsystem
The communication system that connects between the pilot and the drone consists of a radio transmitter and a receiver. The radio transmitter is usually with the pilot on the ground while the receiver is with the drone in the air. The spectrum of the receiver and transmitter is most commonly 2.4 GHz.
Payload
Payload is the weight that the drone can carry together during flight. It usually counted outside of the weight of the drone itself. It include anything additional to the drone such as camera, sensor and package for delivery depend on the mission of that drone have to do.
FPV Subsystem
First-Person-View (FPV) subsystem allow pilot to have a live video feed from the drone. It helps the pilot to have control from the driver or pilot's view point. This subsystem consist of a fpv camera, a video transmitter (vtx) and a video receiver (vrx).
Power Subsystem
Power subsystem consist of battery and power module. The battery on the drone is generally a high-rate lithium polymer battery, which is characterized by high energy density, light weight, and high current resistance.
Power module is a device that provide a stable power supply to the autopilot. It also supports measuring the battery voltage and current consumption from the battery. It is able tell the pilot about the battery level through communication by using telemetry from the drone to the ground station.
Propulsion Subsystem
Propulsion subsystem is the subsystem that responsible to lift the drone into the air. Commonly it is consist of Motor, Electronic Speed Controller (ESC) and propeller fan. Motor is the device that rotate the propeller to generate lift, while ESC control the rotational speed of the motor. Since this UAV's frame type is quadcopter, it need 4 Motors, 4 ESCs and 4 propeller fans to operate.
Telemetry
Telemetry is a digital two-way communication tool between the vehicle and ground station, which can both send data about the flight down to a ground station (Mission Planner) and send command up to the flight controller in the vehicle. Telemetry system is crucial for UAV because it provide real time aircraft condition such as position (coordinate point), altitude, direction, battery level and able to tell the pilot if something wrong happened to the vehicle such as thrust lost, GPS glitch, failsafe triggered etc. Pilot also can give command to the
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