Design and Implementation of a Drone Quadcopter Using Low Cost Microcontrollers

Abstract

The objective of this project was defined as the design and implementation of a drone quadcoper using low cost microcontrollers.

As it is described among the successive sections, a selection of the basic components was first made. The assembly of those served as a platform under which to develop an embedded control system, based on the microcontroller ESP8266. In conjunction to it, a separate remote controller was also designed and built to send the appropriate commands to the drone. In this case, the MSP430 microcontroller was used.

As a complete system to develop, the hardware was conceived first, for both remote and on-board controllers. Starting with the definition of the needed auxiliary components to interact with the microcontrollers, the PCB’s were then designed.

After that, the firmware to be executed in the boards could be written, using the IDE’s Code Composer Studio for the MSP430 and Arduino for the ESP8266, this last one mounted in the development board ESP-12E.

The main content of this project corresponds to the development of the drone’s controller firmware, which consists of several tasks being executed sequentially. The most relevant is the one that calculates the control outputs, needed to maintain the drone under the desired attitude, implementing three Proportional Integral Derivative (PID) structures. To get initial PID parameters, a simple dynamic model of the drone was built with Matlab Simulink.

The complete system was tested statically to debug firmware and hardware issues and to verify its robustness and safety. Then, flight tests were arranged to finish the PID tuning and prove that the drone can operate in a real scenario.