Success! Taking video from the quadcopter is about three weeks premature, but I couldn’t resist. I definitely should’ve waited for a roll-cage over the electronics, and this is made apparent by the fact that my front motor isn’t working after a few crashes today.
I wanted to take some aerial shots of Lake Osceola on campus, but I thought it would be more interesting to switch the camera into ‘video’ mode first. It worked out OK because the winds were too strong for me to attempt keeping the quad stable. The few pictures I took in the air turned out to be very blurry. I really need to do some solid testing of my PID parameters before I try anything this crazy again. Next time though, I will go much higher (with calmer winds).
Anyways here is the video that was captured (with an epic last crash) and two pictures extracted from the video.
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.
