Embedded Visual Control Final report
Martijn van den Dungen, Vlad Spiridonescu · 2012
In order to manage the building of an entire robot from scratch, a great deal of various abilities and knowledge is involved. The project revlves round the building of a quadcopter (a multicopter lifted and propelled by four motors). Design decisions were taken according to certain requirements: small price, flexibility, maintainability and modifiability. Also the physical magnitude represented an important fact since the multitude of very small and big quadcopters already built unleashes the curiosity of trying a relatively medium size. Another important reason for our decision has been the maximum weight that can be lifted by the propellers associated with the overall size. Elements of embedded systems, vision and control have been taken into consideration. Two processing nodes are used: a microcontroller and an FPGA . The vision aspect demands the possibility of the quadcopter to acquire images/keypoints of the environment through a specific sensor. This was attained by attaching a camera to the FPGA board. A program needs to be made that controls the quadcopter and stabilizes it. The project has been divided into different tasks, considering the multitude of areas that are addressed. One tough job was to handle the time disproportion between some parts for which the research/development track was entirely different. Hence, there were moments when physical parts were longexpected to be delivered while, for another task, research was made to find the optimal solution that would satisfy the proposed requirements. At the time, practically no work was done and this cannot be truly estimated in advance but just by supposition. During the project we focused on obtaining results that are significant for those interested in building such a robot, hence various approaches and ideas were welcomed and tried extensively to be implemented.