STABILIZED UAV FLIGHT SYSTEM DESIGN USING RASPBERRY PI

GURUBASAVA S HONNUR
PG Scholar, E &C Dept., DBIT, Bangalore, Karnataka, India
gurubasav.h@gmail.com

BHAGYA P
Asso. Professor, E & C Dept., DBIT, Bangalore, Karnataka, India
bhagya2k@gmail.com

ABSTRACT: The development in the field of UAV (Unmanned Air Vehicle) performance is very
important and even the highest flexibility of using the air vehicle makes the human friendly. The
need of robot or the flight system is much more in the field of defence and even in large scale
industries for inspections purposes. The stabilization of quad copter using Raspberry pi B+ helps
the developer to increase the artificial intelligence of the air vehicle because Raspberry pi is a mini
computer and even the user friendly.

The quad copter mainly consists of BLDC motors, frame, propeller, electronic speed controller,
battery and the controller. The controller makes to fly the quad copter at desire height and helps to
move in any direction by adjusting the PWM of each motors.

KEYWORDS: Raspberry pi B+, BLDC Motor, ESC, Propeller, Battery and the Frame.

INTRODUCTION

Recently, as the methods using UAV are being required in the multipurpose surveillance and
monitoring technologies such as lifesaving, Gathering the information about weather conditions,
the forest fire avoidance, and even in defense area etc., as a degree to minimize the cost and the
increase in the performance helps the air vehicle designer and the developer. UAV (Unmanned Air
Vehicle) are winning the attention even in the public sector for security view in large function and
in crowded regions. The steadiness of the air vehicle using a raspberry pi makes lot of
development in public sector and in defense sector.

The research objective was to design the flight stabilization system as a part of the study for the
movement control module to fly at proper height between the ground and the air vehicle. The
stabilization can be done by proper adjustment PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) which makes to
rotate propeller at desire RPM (Revolution per Minute) using the minicomputer Raspberry pi B+.

RELATED WORKS

Stabilized UAV Flight System Design for Structure Safety Inspection [1] et al. is proposed by Oh-
hoon Cho, Kyeong-jin Ban, Eung-kon Kim. The idea for the small air vehicle-based structure
safety inspection, it is very important to collect the images without shaking and the data by
manipulating the air vehicle, even though the inspector does not have professional experience. In
this article, the method for the stabilized flight system design for the safety inspection of the small
air vehicle-based structures.
Design and Development of a Quad Copter (UMAASK) Using CAD/CAM/CAE [2] et al. is
proposed by Irfan Anjum Manarvi, Muhammad Aqib, Muhammad Ajmal, Muhammad Usman.
This Paper focuses Micro flying vehicles1 (MFV) have become a popular area of research due to
economy of production, flexibility of launch and variety of applications. A large number of
techniques from pencil sketching to computer based software are being used for designing specific
geometries and selection of materials to arrive at novel designs for specific requirements. Present
research was focused on development of suitable design configuration using CAD/CAM/CAE
tools and techniques. A number of designs were reviewed for this purpose. Finally, rotary wing
Quad copter flying vehicle design was considered appropriate for this research. Performance
requirements were planned as approximately 10 meters ceiling, weight less than 500grams and
ability to take videos and pictures. Parts were designed using Finite Element Analysis,
manufactured using CNC machines and assembled to arrive at final design named as UMAASK.
Flight tests were carried out which confirmed the design requirements.

Intelligent Control and Navigation of an Indoor Quad-copter [3] et al. is proposed by Yiwen Luo
Meng, Joo Er Li Ling, Yong Chiang, Ju Chien. This paper documents the development of a quad
copter with indoor control scheme and navigation capability. A stabilized flying control system
including traditional PID controller, Raspberry Pi onboard flight computer and electronic speed
controller was developed to provide the basic platform for the quad-copter. PID tuning was
utilized optimize the performance. In addition, RGB and depth cameras and other sensors were
deployed to enable remote semi-autonomous control.

PROPOSED SYSTEM

UAV refers to the small air vehicle, which mounts camera, communication equipments, various
sensors or other equipments to manage them and is controlled remotely or controlled
automatically according the pre-configured control program. Although it is small enough that the
man cannot board directly, if the operator controls directly and indirectly the air vehicle and the
contents for specific tasks to be controlled are programmed, the air vehicle itself will arrive at the
position and perform the tasks according to the information collected by various sensors mounted
in the air vehicle. In the current unmanned air vehicle technology areas, the most advanced area is
the military weapon system area such as Hunter, Predator, Global Hawk, etc., and various areas
are using low cost and minimum size of UAV such as the meteorological area to collect the
weather information, the environmental area to collect the ecosystem information, the air
photography for the geological information in the private industrial areas, etc.

Type of Multi-Copter
As one type of UAV developed by complementing the weakness of the helicopter, multi-copter is
the air vehicle enabled the stable position control by rotating the props reversely without rotating
fuselage. The number of props it has, the greater power can be obtained greater power. Micro-
copter is classified into the multi-copter and the micro-copter according to the size, and according
to the number of rotors, which obtain the lift and propulsion, it is sub-classified into the dual-
copter or heli-copter having 2 rotors, tri-copter having 3 rotors, quad-copter having 4 rotors, hexa-
copter having 6 rotors and octo-copter having 8 rotors, as shown in Fig. 1.

194
 Quad-Copter Hex-Copter Onto-Copter

Figure 1. Classification by number of rotor

And the unmanned flight control system to control such air vehicles is composed of 3 elements;
the ground station, the communication network and the air vehicle.

Blade Rotation Method

In case of normal air vehicles, although to hover in the space, it exposes the weakness of circling
large space, the blade, which is served as propeller enabled the helicopter to take off and land, can
hover and perform stable flight and diverse tasks within the limited space.

Figure 2. Quad-copter

Figure. 2 is showing the quad-copter, a kind of multi-copter classified as UAV, and the Figure. 3
shows that all the 4 blades are formed the rectangular shape, and in case of 4 blades, the blades on
the diagonal line facing each other rotate to same direction, and the adjacent blades are configured
to rotate to reverse direction.

In this time, the ascending and descending of the air vehicle can be induced by changing all the
blade rotation speeds according to the blade rotation method shown in Figure 3, and by changing
the front and back blade speeds (supposing the frontal direction as X-axis), pitch moment is
generated and the roll moment is generated by changing the left and right blade speeds. And if the
speed is changed by controlling the left and right blades and the front and back blades in pair, yaw
moment is generated which is shown in figure 4.

195
Figure 3. Blade Rotation Method Figure 4. Movement Direction by Blade Rotation
Method

FLIGHT STABILIZATION STUDY

Controller
This study was the first stage of the research to design the flight stabilization system, which
controls the movement of the air vehicle accurately and easily by running the python code on
raspberry pi B+ where the code makes continuous change in the PWM data which is needed for
Electronic Speed Controller. Hence the change in PWM cause to change in the RPM of the BLDC
motors. The movement of the air vehicle up and down and from left to right can be done by coding
PWM.

The Picoted is a remote controlled quad copter based on a Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi handles
all the flight control without using a micro controller like Arduino. The operating system of the
raspberry pi B+ in NOOBS and the development software is Python3 which helps for coding
purpose and sends the PWM wave on initialized GPIO pin of the Raspberry pi B+. The Raspberry
pi B+ has 26 GPIOs pins which contains transmitter, receiver, PWM and other features. It also
contains 4 USB, 1 Ethernet, HDMI, Audio pin, SD card socket, 512 byte RAM and camera
interface unit.

Raspberry pi is Linux based system and it is smaller in size and flexible to carry and even to use
and it is shown Figure 5. And GPIO connector in Figure 6.

196
 Figure 5: Raspberry pi B+ Figure 6: GPIO Connector

Electronic Speed Controller and BLDC Motor

The ESC needs the power from battery like Lipo battery, which helps to deliver the more power to
run the BLDC motor. The input to the ESC is PWM wave form and due to the duty cycle of the
wave the Motor runs at proper Revolutions per minute and the propellers makes to fly the Air
vehicle. The 30 Ampere ESC is enough to run 1400kv BLDC motor which is shown in figure 7
and figure 8 respectively. The propellers makes to fly the Air vehicle.

Figure 7: 30A ESc Figure 8:1400Kv BLDC motors

EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS

Final design of the Quad copter using Raspberry pi B+ is shown in Figure 9. The Pi-copter will
move depending on the instruction which will run on python command window. Connection
between the raspberry pi and the keyboard, mouse is wireless which runs on Bluetooth technology.

197
The instruction makes to fly the air vehicle and even the instruction need to move right, left
upward, downward and to halt.

Figure 9: Raspberry pi copter

CONCLUSIONS

In conclusion, this paper includes a complete scheme of an intelligent control and stabilization of
indoor quad copter. Innovations are focused on achieving the same control and navigation systems
with low cost components such as the budget friendly Raspberry Pi computer. In addition, the
independency of the quad-copter is increased as there is no high requirement for the environment
and no pre-installed equipment required to perform the navigation. Moreover, although the quad-
copter is used as the platform for the controlling and navigation system in this project, other
vehicles both aeronautical ones and other based ones can also utilize the system with minor
changes.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I wish to express gratitude to my guide Asso.Prof. Bhagya P who has helped me in preparation of
this paper.

REFERENCES

Oh-hoon Cho, Kyeong-jin Ban, Eung-kon Kim,2013. Stabilized UAV Flight System Design for
Structure Safety Inspection.
Irfan Anjum Manarvi, Muhammad Aqib, Muhammad Ajmal, Muhammad Usman,2012. Design
and Development of a Quad Copter (UMAASK) Using CAD/CAM/CAE
Yiwen Luo Meng, Joo Er Li Ling, Yong Chiang, Ju Chien, Dec 2014. Intelligent Control and
Navigation of an Indoor Quad-copter.

198
Verma, H. Sawant and J. Tan, Selection and Navigation of Mobile Sensor Nodes Using a
Sensor Network, Pervasive and Mobile Computing, Vol. 2 pp. 65 84, 2006
Jong Hyon Hwang, Sungpil Hwang, Sung Kyung Hong, Min Goo Yoo, "Attitude Stabilization
performance Improvement of the Quadrotor Flying Robot", J.ICROS.2012, vol. 18 (6), pp.608
S. Yoon, O. Soysal, M. Demirbas, and C. Qiao, Coordinated locomotion and monitoring using
autonomous mobile sensor nodes, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems,
vol. 22, no. 10, pp. 17421756, Oct. 2011.
Y. Mei, C. Xian, S. Das, C. Hu, Y-H, Lu, Sensor Replacement Using Mobile Robots, Computer
Communications, Vol. 30, pp. 2615-2626.
S. Abdel-Mageid and R.A. Ramadan, Efficient deployment algorithms for mobile sensor
networks, in Autonomous and Intelligent Systems (AIS), 2010 International Conference on,
pp. 1-6.
Jong Hyon Hwang, Sungpil Hwang, Sung Kyung Hong, Min Goo Yoo. "Stabilization
performance improvement of the Quadrotor flying robot", ICROS Annual Conference 2012,
vol. 41, pp. 7-9, April. 2012

199