Construction and integration of a quadcopter in a simulation platform for multi-vehicle missions

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles or UAVs have been growing at a rapid pace due to the huge range of operations they can perform on the field. These vehicles are currently present in military applications, agricultural, rescue missions or telecommunications, among many other fields. However, some of the existing UAV solutions in the market are quite costly, not only monetarily but also in the complexity they entail. The objective of this work is to build a low-cost quadcopter (a type of UAV) and integrate it in a multi-vehicle mission simulation platform. The quadcopter is built with the help of a mounting guide and must be able to perform all basic flight operations. The simulation platform provides a flexible configuration of missions and test scenarios that allows to study the performance of the UAVs. After the integration, we will be able to analyze the interactions between real and simulated UAVs. Several tests (individual and collective) on the components used and interaction with the simulation platform are taken into account to evaluate the performance of the flight and integration with the simulation platform. With the tuning and testing done, it was possible to perform a brief flight and the virtual quadcopter managed to follow the real quadcopter’s movement. With these experiments, we can conclude that it is possible to mount a low-cost quadcopter without sacrificing flight or integration in other systems.