Wildfire Detection Quadrotor Design
Aerospace Guidance, Navigation and Controls Lab
As a part of the Aerospace GNC class, we designed a controller for a quadrotor that would sweep the section of the motion capture area and collect thermal data. The temperature data was captured using a heat sensor that was fitted on the quadrotor and connected to an Arduino microcontroller. The path plan for the quadrotor was chosen as a sinusoid curve bounded by the edges of the motion capture space.
Execution
We used PID control methods coded in C++ to control the quadrotors motion along the sinusoidal wave flight path. It was my first introduction to playing around with gains to understand how it affected the motion of the quadrotor, the overshoot that it could cause and how closely we could achieve the desired trajectory. We went through several iterations with the drone flipping out on us before we could successfully get the sweep maneuver and collect data.