I presented my quadcopter work at the Research and Creativity Forum yesterday. It was a great time. A couple of my professors stopped by and the judges seemed very impressed. It’s always good to get some motivation to continue working on this. The poster that I had at the event is linked in PDF format on the right. It’s a good summary of the project so far with applications of the quad, hardware relationships, and a couple graphs generated by in-flight data. Last Saturday I flew it again and even had a three minute flight getting as high as 30 feet (slightly terrifying because I haven’t built a ‘roll cage’ yet). There seems to be a bit of a ‘fishbowl’ effect when transitioning from motion to hover. Maybe I’ll try to add some of the “I” to the PID controller to help with this. Right now I’m using these constants: P = 1.7, I = 0.0, D = -1.4, xMitFactor = 0.2. This weekend I’ll try to take some aerial photographs. Here are some pictures of the quad. I just added the XBee shield recently (turns out my first microcontroller was busted) and I’ll add some shots of that soon.
