Getting started with quadrocopters

Publié le 18 Janvier 2014

Getting started with quadrocopters

We often get contacted by people interested in getting started with quadrocopters. The goal of this page is to provide some links to (what we believe) is relevant information about quadrocopter basics.

Please notice that the Flying Machine Arena does not consist exclusively of quadrocopters. The system contains: a motion capture system that provides position and attitude information; computers for running control and estimation algorithms; radio links to communicate with the vehicles. Furthermore, a simulator and various algorithms developed in-house support the different projects. An overview of the system can be found in the paper “The Flying Machine Arena as of 2010“. A more comprehensive and up-to-date version of it will be published in early 2014. For other details on our work please refer to the papers on the publications page.

Modeling

A tutorial on the modeling and control of quadrocopters will be posted here soon. For more detailed information, we refer to a research paper that describes in details the mathematical equations governing quadrocopter flight:

Mahony, R.; Kumar, V.; Corke, P., “Multirotor Aerial Vehicles: Modeling, Estimation, and Control of Quadrotor,” Robotics & Automation Magazine, IEEE , vol.19, no.3, pp.20,32, Sept. 2012
IEEE link

Electronics and flight control
There are a number of open-source multicopter projects out there, such as the Pixhawk PX4: we are currently in the process of switching over to using the Pixhawk PX4 FMU electronics in the FMA. The electronics are open-source, as is the source code.

Below are listed some other interesting projects, and their wikis & forums would also be good places to look for further information: