Progress, Results, and Conclusions

We were able to balance the drone on the test jig using a PID controller. This was done for both roll and pitch axes of the drone. However, we were not able to get the drone hover in open space as the motors were not powerful enough to uplift our contraption. We have not determined whether the drone can follow a designated path because we were unable to make it hover midair. However, our PID worked as intended so we were very close to making the drone hover successfully.

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Issues: 

• Motor Power varied with battery life

  • Every time we swapped in a new battery, we would have to readjust the the PID values

  • Future solution will have the balance leads plug into a PCB, which will allow us to incorporate the battery life into the controller

• Inaccurate Hand-Calculations

  • The initial calculations were still decently far away from what the actual, tuned PID values were. 

  • Designing the entire drone in CAD, will allow us to get the most accurate moments of inertia for each axis

• Weak Propellers

  • The propellers we used, were too small for the drone, and limited the maximum power we were able to generate

• 1 Axis-fixed Jig

  • There are testing setups, which allow the drone to freely rotate in any direction, and just constrain it to the ground, which would’ve allowed us to have a more realistic testing setup, which would’ve translated better to hovering

• Hardware bootup issues

  • Each time we swapped a battery, we had to rerun the ESC calibration sequence, which was about 15 seconds, and re-SSH into the raspberry pi.

  • The raspberry pi needs to give the USB ports, read and write access each time it’s booted up with “Sudo chmod 666 /dev/by-id/$arduino_port

• ESC Unreliability

  • The ESC’s initially gave different power to each motor, despite having the same PWM inputs. We eventually found a 15 second long calibration sequence, which synced them all up, but this took us a long time

  • Theoretically BLHeli would allow us to calibrate them all however we please, and compensate for the voltage drop, but we were unable to connect to them.

• Jumper Jam

  • Way too many jumpers with way too many loose connections, dedicated connectors will definitely be implemented in Drone Kahlo v2