Section: New Software and Platforms

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) platform

Participants : Thomas Bellavoir, Paolo Robuffo Giordano [correspondant] .

From 2014, the team also started some activities involving perception and control for single and multiple quadrotor UAVs, especially thanks to a grant from “Rennes Métropole” (see Section  9.1.5 ) and the ANR project “SenseFly” (see Section  9.2.4 ). To this end, we purchased four quadrotors from Mikrokopter Gmbh, Germany (Fig. 7 .a), and one quadrotor from 3DRobotics, USA (Fig. 7 .b). The Mikrokopter quadrotors have been heavily customized by: $\left(i\right)$ reprogramming from scratch the low-level attitude controller onboard the microcontroller of the quadrotors, $\left(ii\right)$ equipping each quadrotor with an Odroid XU4 board (Fig. 7 .d) running Linux Ubuntu and the TeleKyb software (the middleware used for managing the experiment flows and the communication among the UAVs and the base station), and $\left(iii\right)$ purchasing the Flea Color USB3 cameras together with the gimbal needed to mount them on the UAVs (Fig. 7 .c). The quadrotor group will be used as robotic platforms for testing a number of single and multiple flight control schemes with a special attention on the use of onboard vision as main sensory modality.

Figure 7. a) Quadrotor XL1 from Mikrokopter, b) Quadrotor Iris from 3DRobotics, c) Flea Color USB3 camera, d) Odroid XU4 board

(a) (b) (c) (d)