Building a quadcopter

Building a quadcopter

in under two hours!!!

 

This is a small post on how to build a quadcopter. I know there is tons of similar posts on the web, but anyhow I wanted to share with you my experience while building one.

This particular build is a one of our research work-horse/test-bed quadrotor that I build for the MAST Lab. I was in need of a twin brother of my actual quad, to test different FC with different companion computers. I’m actually using a Raspberry pi B+ and Raspberry pi 2, as companion computers, and a PX4 and a MultiWii AIO for flight controllers (I’ll explain later). I have built close to 20 vehicles (perhaps…), and rebuild twice as that… that’s why it took me like a hour and a half from disassembled parts to flying.

What is a quadcopter?

 

In few words, it’s a vehicle that is lifted and propelled by four rotors. Its also called quadrotor, quadcopter, multicopter, multirotor helicopter, rotorcraft, MRUAV (multi-rotor unmanned aerial vehicle), etc…

The lift in multicopters is generated by two sets of identical fixed pitched vertically oriented propellers; two clockwise (CW) and two counter-clockwise (CCW). These use variation of RPM to control lift and torque. Control of vehicle motion is achieved by altering the rotation rate of one or more rotor discs, thereby changing it’s torque load and thrust/lift characteristics.

FBD
FBD

Ingredients:

 

  • Tools (tweezers, screwdriver set, small knife)
  • Frame
  • Motors (4)
  • ESC (4)
  • Propellers (2 CW and 2 CCW)
  • Cables
  • Radio with rx/tx module
  • LiPo battery
  • Flight controller
Quadcopter Ingredients
Quadcopter Ingredients

Then the rest of the recipe is mix all ingredients together and in a hour you will have a quadcopter flying around!! 😀

The frame I choose for this built is a very cheap 330mm glass fiber frame, the size is 330mm which means there is 33 centimeters from rotor to rotor. This frame is about £6. I bought several of this one due to the price, but they break quite easy, you’re now warned!

The motors I had are some SK3 1130kv, this ones have a max power of 125 watts, which is quite nice, pretty powerful small motors! They are brushless.

What is a brushless motor?

 

Also called BLDC motors or BL motors are synchronous motors that are powered by a DC electric source via an integrated inverter/switching power supply (most commonly know as electronic speed control), which produces an AC electric signal to drive the motor. Brushless DC motors have many advantages over their brushed DC motor counterparts. The most obvious advantage of a brushless motor is its lack of brushes and physical commutator. This difference means that there are many fewer parts that can wear out or break and need to be replaced than in a brushed motor.

Brushless motors, otherwise called outrunners or inrunners, have become very popular with radio controlled airplane hobbyists because of their efficiency, power, longevity and light weight in comparison to traditional brushed motors.

Two key performance parameters of brushless DC motors are the motor constants Kv and Km. Kv being the most popular one. Kv is RPMs per volt, the higher kv motor is faster because at the same voltage it will be spinning a higher rpm. The motors used in this build are 1130 kv, and my battery is 11.1 volts, so:

1130 x 11.1 = 12,543 RPM

This motor will turn at 12,543 revolutions per minute when I give them 11.1 volts… This kv is adequate for this type of build, I will not go into more detail about this (for now…)

SK3 1130kv
SK3 1130kv

The first step is fixing the motors to the frame arms, as showed in the next pictures:

The next step is to put all the screws in place to finish putting the frame together. You will have something like this:

Frame done with motors.
Frame done with motors.

What is a ESC?

 

A electronic speed controller is a integrated inverter/switching power supply that will drive BL motors (as stated before…). Brushless ESC systems basically drive tri-phase brushless motors by sending a sequence of signals for rotation. For this built I had laying around 4 Multistar 20amps (maximum) ESC, these are cheap as well, and it will update at 480 Hz.

The default output rate in the RC industry is 50 Hz. The recommended output rate for multicopter ESCs is 400 Hz, in order to minimise latency (NOT because the outputs would require 400 Hz, as multicopter rotors spin only at 80-120 Hz and can’t change speed multiple times during a single revolution). Having 400 Hz or 480 Hz will make the response of the vehicle a lot smoother  and nicer.

So, go ahead and place those 4 ESC in your frame, and fix them using cable ties or something similar:

IMG_2161

Its important to notice that I’m using a power distribution board, which is just a breakout board with bullet connectors, that will save me the hassle of soldering all cables together, because the power to the ESC must be the same for all of them. You can choose not use it and use a joined cable or something similar.

This is the bottom of the quadcopter with the ESC connected to the distribution board and the motors connected to the ESCs:

IMG_2162

Then the next step is to fix you flight controller… The FC must be close to the center of gravity (CoG), and the must important part is that we need to isolate it from vibrations as much as possible. I usually 3D print a couple of plates and use special cheap rubber balls.

As explained in the beginning of the post, this build is for my research lab, and I’m using the FC with a onboard computer, which makes everything larger…

I’m testing several flight controllers and different architectures, thats the purpose of having two (or more) twin quadcopters, that will behave in a similar way. But thats another story, lets keep on building.

I will join to steps into one, fixing the FC and the props.

What is a fixed pitch propeller?

 

A propeller is a type of fan that transmits power by converting rotational motion into thrust. A pressure difference is produced between the forward and rear surfaces of the airfoil-shaped blade, and a fluid (such as air or water) is accelerated behind the blade.

“Pitch” describes how much the blade of the propeller is twisted relative to the path it travels as it turns. This is also known as the angle of attack, and is usually measured in inches. Imagine the propeller turning through the water or air. If it moves forward following the angle of the pitch perfectly, and moves forward 10 inches in one full revolution, it is said to have a pitch of 10 inches.

So, if we combine the two definitions, a fixed pitch propeller is a type of prop that cannot be adjusted or changed. It has one pitch, which is usually a compromise between speed and power.

For this quadcopter I’ll be using a 3 blade 7×4.5 (7 inch in diameter with 4.5 in pitch) in plastic, of course in their CW and CCW form, this is also called R (right) and L (left) prop.

Quadcopters can be configured in + (plus) configuration or X (cross) configuration, the props will need to be installed in this manner for each configuration:

+ and X configuration
+ and X configuration

Personally, I prefer the X configuration and its the one I use in all of my quads.

What is a flight controller?

 

This is a topic that could easily extend a lot… But a quick definition would be something like this: Small computer that contains accelerometers, giroscopes, magnetometers and a barometric pressure sensor, that will use this sensors to maintain the vehicle level by sending PWM commands to the ESC.

In a perhaps more practical way, is a computer that will help us to fly a multirotor. The one for this quad is a MultiWii AIO v2 board, that uses a ATMEGA 2560, which is a popular micro-controller because is onboard of Arduinos!

The brain of this flight controller is a high-performance, low-power Atmel 8-bit AVR RISC-based microcontroller combines 256KB ISP flash memory, 8KB SRAM, 4KB EEPROM, 86 general purpose I/O lines, 32 general purpose working registers, real time counter, six flexible timer/counters with compare modes, PWM, 4 USARTs, byte oriented 2-wire serial interface, 16-channel 10-bit A/D converter, and a JTAG interface for on-chip debugging.

And the sensors are this ones:

  • MPU6050 6 axis gyro/accelerometer with Motion Processing Unit
  • HMC5883L 3-axis digital magnetometer
  • MS5611-01BA01 high precision altimeter

Which is also another topic of conversation… but perhaps later.

Its important to notice that without software the above hardware is useless… This FC uses the MultiWii software, which is very popular, easy to change (sometimes) and written in C, well in the Arduino language/IDE.

The configuration of the FC is rather easy, opening the Arduino IDE and the MultiWii.ino file, in the config.h file, we need to setup that this vehicle is a quadcopter in X configuration, the minimum PWM for our ESC, the radio type we have and so forth… This is covered in detail on the MultiWii manual.

After programming and mounting the FC unit, we need to test if the motors are turning in the right direction, we can easily change the direction of the motors, by moving one side of the 3 cables of the ESC/Motor to just another position. More easily explained… if the air is going upwards instead of downwards, them change the position of one of the cables. This needs to be done being very careful. Remember that props rotating a 10000 rpm are super dangerous.

Fixing motor directions
Fixing motor directions
This are the cables that might need to be adjusted if the direction is not right.
These are the cables that might need to be moved if the direction is not right.

Once this is completed…. oh!!!! I forgot to take pictures when installing the RX… but for that one you just need to plug channel 1 of the RX to the channel 1 port on the FC and so forth.

And now you have a ready to fly quadcopter!!!

Ready to fly!
Ready to fly!

And now whats next is to actually perform a test flight, the best idea is just to hover the vehicle at 10-20 cm from the ground and check that everything is okay, then slowly check that the roll and pitch commands are not inverted and that the vehicle is responding nicely and smooth. Remember, flying is everything about small corrections.

First hover
First hover

Congratulations! you just succeed to create something that flies.

Look at the twins:

IMG_2177

 

And more close ups:

 

Thanks a lot for reading!

 

Swing-Free Manoeuvre Controller for Rotorcraft Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Slung-Load System Using Echo State Networks

Swing-Free Manoeuvre Controller for Rotorcraft Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Slung-Load System Using Echo State Networks

A journal publication of a research I did last year was recently accepted and published on the International Journal of Unmanned Systems Engineering (ISSN: 2052-112X).

slung load animation

The title of my research is:

Swing-Free Manoeuvre Controller for Rotorcraft Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Slung-Load System Using Echo State Networks

Abstract:

There is a growing interest in developing Rotorcraft Unmanned Aerial Systems (RUAS) with advanced onboard autonomous capabilities. RUAS is a very versatile vehicle and its unique flying characteristics enable it to carry loads, hanging in wires underneath it. This suspended load alters the flight characteristics of the vehicle. In this paper, an anti-swing manoeuvre controller for a rotorcraft unmanned aerial system with an attached suspended load (slung-load) is proposed. The presented architecture is powered by Echo State Networks (ESN) that enables simple modeling of the controller and outperforms linear techniques in terms of robustness to unmodelled dynamics and disturbances. The external load behaves like a pendulum; this can change the natural frequencies and mode shapes of the low frequency modes of the RUAS. The technique chosen to solve the problem is to achieve both robust performance and computational efficiency. Reservoir Computing (RC) is an alternative to gradient descent methods for training Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN), which represent a very powerful generic tool, integrating both large dynamical memory and highly adaptable computational capabilities. ESN is a type of reservoir computing; the advantage lies in the ability to overcome the difficulties in RNN training, it is conceptually simple and computationally inexpensive. It has been demonstrated that a model and controller design using ESN may be developed. ESN performs well to control unknown nonlinear systems.

Keywords: Autonomous systems, Echo State Networks, Nonlinear systems, Slungload multicopter, Recurrent neural networks, Reservoir computing.

 


And of course you can read it completely from here this url: http://www.ijuseng.com/#/ijuseng-3-1-26-37-2015/4587568279

Full details:

Article
IJUSEng – 2015, Vol. 3, No. 1, 26-37
http://dx.doi.org/10.14323/ijuseng.2015.3

 

 

Pilot Point of View

Pilot Point of View

While I was waiting for some parts of my hexacopter to come (GPS post and similar stuff) I removed the dust of my 500mm quadcopter, AlduxQuad.

I use all my batteries, so lots of flight time, for AlduxQuad I have:

  • 4 x 2200 mah 3S 30-40C
  • 3300 mah 3S 60-70C
  • 4500 mah 3S 20-40C (the less powerful I have)

I removed all the heavy stuff, making AlduxQuad super agile and fast, also I added some nice LED stripes to know the direction of the quadcopter while flying very high and always know the reference.

So, in this video, I put the GoPro in my mouth, using my teeth 😛

You can see the quadcopter doing a dance, by just yawing a lot and trying to keep the altitude, easy and fun stuff!

 

alduxquad batteries

AlduxQuad

AlduxQuad

This was my second quadcopter build, but first one documented… The post is here.

Built for fun and to learn to fly a quadcopter. More than capable to carry a GoPro.

Specs:

  • Motors: Turnigy Aerodrive 940kv
  • Props: 10 x 4.5 SF
  • Flight controller: APM
  • ESC: 25 amps Turnigy
  • Frame: 500mm from rotor to rotor, aluminium

Current configuration:

  • APM 2.5 (upgradable and reprogrammable, original, not clone)
  • GPS uBlox with 3D printed case for extra protection (color red), excellent waypoint navigation
  • Voltage / Current sensor connected to the APM
  • Extra visible navigation LED stripes (blue for forward and red indicates back)
  • Turnigy 9x RX / TX (1000 meters range in LOS)
  •  3D printed anti-vibration mount for the flight controller (providing excellent loiter)
  • Runs great on 2200 mAh LiPo batteries (10 min flight times)

Current pics:

Some extra pics:

And some videos made with this vehicle:

 

TEGO v1

TEGO v1

First 300 class quadrotor

This was built with the idea to be use inside the MAST Lab, and is still being used. This first version was a frame bought in hobbyking.

  • 5 x 3 props
  • 1800 kv Turnigy motors
  • Glass fiber precutted frame (easily broken)
  • Flight controller: Multiwii (several boards tested)

 

Videos:

 

TEGO v2

TEGO v2

First 3D printed quadrotor, very very similar to TEGO 1, same motors and ESC, just different frame. First one to be flow with the computer, making use of the multiwii serial protocol, and a computer joystick. The post is here.

  • 1900kv turnigy motors
  • 10amps ESC
  • FC multiwii
  • 5×3 props
  • 3D printed frame 250 mm rotor to rotor

Videos:

 

How is a quadcopter born?

How is a quadcopter born?

This educative video shows how a quadcopter is born, and of course its maiden flight.

I had to built a quad with some parts we order from hobbyking, so, I took my camera, put it in a tripod, read some instructions in the internet on recommended settings for stop motion videos, talk with my buddy Murray about cameras and lenses… and then, a quadcopter was born!!!!

Happiness everywhere!!!

TEGO slow mo crash

TEGO slow mo crash

So, I change motors, ESC’s and props to the TEGOv3 frame and did a quick test, only to find out it was way more powerful and uncontrollable… and eventually leading the poor quad to a crash. And very nice slow mo action!!!

New parts:

  • 6×5 in glow in the dark propellers
  • 10 amp ESC’s
  • SK3 3100kv 42watts BLDC motors

I recorded the crash @ 100fps, 720p, then use GoPro studio to slow down the video. You can hear the laughs of evil and very strange noises.

Bonfire & AlduxQuad

Bonfire & AlduxQuad

Your quadcopter might be cool, but not as cool as a quadcopter flying over a impressive bonfire (spoiler alert, duh)… Bonfire Night is an annual event dedicated to bonfires, fireworks and celebrations. Some of the world’s most popular Bonfire instances include Great Britain’s Guy Fawkes Night, which is a annual commemoration observed on 5 of November.

And my favorite skydiving airfield “Skydive Strathallan” could not stand behind… For them is an annual tradition, for me it was my first bonfire night, very fun and highly dangerous.

The main difference with this weekend at Strathallan is that I took my dear AlduxQuad with me… The rest is history. Its better if you watch the video, be warned, its a little long, 8 minutes and 34 seconds.