Autonomous Helicopter Field Flight

UC Berkeley final project for ME 135 (Design of Microprocessor-Based Mechanical Systems) and EE149 (Intro to Embedded Systems). The goal was to make an autonomous helicopter. This video shows our first free-flight off of the test-stand. The control scheme here is not as tuned as our other video so the flight is very wobbly. However, we were very pleased to see that it did not crash and we hope to see how our updated control code will perform. These types of helicopters are very difficult to fly as they have six degrees of freedom (can move forward/backward, side to side, up and down, as well as roll/pitch) allowing them to even fly upside down. All of the control was performed by an on-board micro-controller (National Instruments: Labview ARM) and data was sent via bluetooth to a ground station for later viewing. Eventually GPS and a kalman filter will be added so that the helicopter can travel to waypoints while its position is updated in real-time in google earth.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Autonomous helicopter
• uc berkeley
• me 135
• ee149