Titulo Estágio
Robustness assessment and improvement of a Quadcopter’s Flight Controller
Áreas de especialidade
Engenharia de Software
Engenharia de Software
Local do Estágio
DEI
Enquadramento
Research interest in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), particularly in small-scale aerial robots, is growing rapidly due to their wide range of applications and their potential to perform tasks that are costly to be performed by humans or threat humans’ safety. Among all UAVs, quadrotors are increasingly receiving attention in different areas (e.g., search and rescue, precision agriculture, security surveillance in airports, or photography and filming in concerts, TV shows, or sport matches), because of their flexibility in movement, simplicity in terms of mechanical design, and low price. A quadrotor, which is also known as quadcopter, is a kind of helicopter with four rotors that make it very agile to attain the full range of motion (capability of hovering, horizontal flight, and vertical take-off and landing. Despite their flying ability, this expanding use of quadrotors raises concerns regarding the safety issues due to malfunction. To ensure quadrotors’ safe operation, a series of redundant and complimentary sensing devices (e.g., accelerometer, gyroscope, compass, barometer, magnetometer) and GPS (or other positioning system) together with data filtering mechanisms are used by a flight controller to compute the quadrotor’s position and orientation. Data from the sensors, which are inherently inaccurate, are combined by a sensor fusion algorithm for correcting deficiencies.
Objetivo
This work aims at using a practical approach for assessing the capability of the sensor fusion algorithm used by the flight controller in presence of faults affecting the sensors and GPS. To this end, we need to inject a number of faults in the sensors of a quadcopter using the ArduCopter flight controller platform. The quadcopter’s behavior will be analyzed within both a simulated and real environment. After disclosing the flight controller’s flaws, the main objective is to improve the robustness of the flight controller to operate safely in presence of faults. In practice, the expected outcome of this internship is:
• Testing and improving the robustness of the ArduCopter flight controller;
• A research paper to be published in a related international conference.
Plano de Trabalhos - Semestre 1
Work Plan of 1º Semester
[Some tasks might overlap; M=Month]
T1 (M1): Knowledge transfer and state of the art review on the existing works.
T2 (M1-M4): Preliminary tests in the simulated environment.
T3 (M5): Writing the Intermediate internship report.
Plano de Trabalhos - Semestre 2
Work Plan of 2º Semester
[Some tasks might overlap; M=Month]
T1 (M6): Integration of the intermediate defense comments in the work and report.
T2 (M6-M8): robustness testing in the real environment.
T3 (M9): Propose solutions to improve the robustness of the controller.
T4 (M8): Implement and test the solution.
T5 (M9): Writing the final internship report.
T6 (M10): Write a research paper and submission to a related international conference.
Condições
The selected student will be integrated in the Software and Systems Engineering (SSE) group of CISUC. The work will be carried out in the facilities of the Department of Informatics Engineering at the University of Coimbra (CISUC - Software and Systems Engineering Group), where a work place and necessary computer resources will be provided.
Observações
Please contact the advisors for any question or clarification needed.
Advisors: Naghmeh Ivaki (naghmeh@dei.uc.pt), Henrique Madeira (henrique@dei.uc.pt)
Orientador
Henrique Santos do Carmo Madeira
henrique@dei.uc.pt 📩