Advanced Multi-rotor Drone

Design Goal
The basis of this project is to combine the use of lifting bodies and FPGAs to create a more efficient drone. The use of the lifting body will cut down on the amount of power needed to keep the drone in hover mode, and will allow more power for the control systems. This will result in a longer flight time, allowing more land to be surveyed in a single flight.In addition, we will characterize the most efficient motor through motor testing to save the power. In addition,this project has a potential application that conducting the geographic mapping and photography with less power consumption. The idea is to map the landscape features and collect more accurate data through the drone camera without designating human resource especially in some remote areas.

Detailed Specifications
Arduino based control system(developing stage)

FPGA   based cotrol  system(final stage)

Arduino based ESC controllers

rotating glimbals

30 minutes flight time

Matlab Simulation
The final customized flight path is following, the drone will be lift off straightly to reach a certain height, and then we are in an agreement to let it to fly in a grid path. Next,we will use the cosine wave to approximately represent the rectangular wave path, if you look at it from the sky to the ground here which flies in an approximately rectangular path, the reason why we choose this grid path is that we do not have to fly in an exciting path for the sake of mapping service. Because one of the potential serving purpose of our drone can be a geographic mapping tool, so the slow grid flying path can be helpful for both taking and stitching the images.