Development and Implementation of Wireless Controlled Quadcopter using WiFi Technology Roshan Bhatkar Jerrin Thadathil Varghese Sarath Raj Nadarajan Syamala Undergraduate Student Amity University Dubai Dubai, UAE roshanb@amitydubai.ae Faculty-Aerospace Engineering Amity University Dubai Dubai, UAE jvarghese@amityuniversity.ae Faculty-Aerospace Engineering Amity University Dubai Dubai, UAE sraj@amityuniversity.ae Abstract—Nowadays we are nding newer and newer efcient ways to carry out tasks by using the concept of automation and machinery combined. One of the ways to accomplish such a task is by using a quadcopter. It can accomplish a vertical trip in a steady way and be utilized to screen or gather information in an explicit area, for example, mapping landscapes. Mechanical advances have diminished the expense and increment the execution of the low power microcontrollers that enabled the overall population to build up their very own quadcopter. The objective of this venture is to manufacture, change, and make enhancements in the control conguration of the quadcopter to acquire stable ight. The objective of this paper is to incorporate Wi-Fi communication in controlling the quadcopter by using an inexpensive microcontroller as a ight computer and develop an HTML webpage to receive the video-feed transmitted from the mobile phone camera xed on the quadcopter. Index Terms—Quadcopter, Wireless Communication, Arduino, PID I. I NTRODUCTION There has been extensive growth in the unmanned aerial vehicle sector mainly for Quadcopter, a remotely controlled aerial vehicle widely used by many industries for different purposes. Quadcopter has been widely known to us by many names such Drones, Multi-copters or Quadrotors. Manned Quadcopter was rst built somewhere around the 1920s but due to its mechanical complexity, large size and weight and difculties in control, high level of instability, it didn’t become popular. [1] Quadcopter being easily accessible, cheaper comparatively to other alternative vehicles like a helicopter and due to its capabilities, they are widely used for surveillance, search and rescue missions, aerial photography and some are also used as Remote Controlled toys. Some enthusiasts also consider drone for racing by modifying its design, this has led to the development of different congurations such as Tri-copters, Hexa-copters, Octocopters, V-tail and H-tail. Extensive improvement in computing efciency and remote controlling capabilities and improvised design of motors and microprocessors and improvised design of Li-Po batteries and sensors like accelerometer and gyroscope has improved Quadcopter designs. [2] The structural design of a Quadcopter consists for 4 arms xed in a shape of X or plus (+) depending on the setup desired by the user. Each of this arm has a Brushless DC motor (BLDC), two BLDC’s rotate in Clockwise direction (CW) and remaining two BLDC’s rotate in Counter Clockwise direction (CCW) and a Fixed-Pitch blade is attach to each motor. These motors allow the Quadcopter to hover, ascend, descend, yaw and pitch in any desired direction. The structural design provides two advantages over Vertical Take Off and Landing (VTOL) vehicles like a helicopter; • There is no particular need of a complex mechanical control for rotor actuation in case of a Quadcopter instead it relies on xed pitch rotors with modulation in speed of motors for control. • Also, the four rotors with small diameter compensate for one main rotor with large diameter relative to the airframe size. [3] Quadcopter consists of four individual inputs, rpm produced by the motors and six degree of freedom movement (three translating and three rotating) motions, due to this, it is hard to stabilize a Quadcopter. All the mentioned parameters are anticipated for the stabilization of a drone. II. LITERATURE REVIEW Modelling of a quadcopter is a complex phase as it has four xed pitch actuators. Most common conguration of a quadcopter is “+” and “x” designs. Most aerodynamically stable conguration is “x” in which 1 and 3 rotators rotate counter clockwise (CW), 2 and 4 rotator rotates counterclockwise (CCW). Due to this the quadcopter usually needs to maintain a stable ight by creating a continuous variation in the rotator velocity which would in turn effect the pitch angle. [4] Fig. 1. Two main types of Quadcopter Conguration. Quadcopter are maneuvered through constant pitch and yaw attitude and motors speed by differing the speeds of each Authorized licensed use limited to: University of Exeter. Downloaded on June 28,2020 at 13:09:25 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply. Fig. 2. Three Axial Movements of a Quadcopter. motor providing different thrust produced. The four basic maneuvers of a quadcopter are mentioned below: • Fig. 5. Yaw movement of a Quadcopter. • Roll: This motion is produced when two motors produce constant thrust and the remaining two motor produce different thrust. The quadcopter rolls toward the direction of motor where thrust is produced less. This motion rolls the quadcopter towards left or right. Vertical Take-off and Landing (VTOL): This motion is produced when all four motors produce more thrust or less thrust. When the thrust produced is quite large, the quadcopter lifts up i.e., it takes off and when the thrust produced is less, the quadcopter descends i.e., it lands. Fig. 6. Take-Off and Landing action of a Quadcopter. Fig. 3. Rolling Action of a Quadcopter. • Pitch: This motion is produced when three motors produce constant thrust and the remaining one motor produce a greater a thrust compared to the other three motors. The quadcopters pitch forward and backward depending on the motor which produces more thrust. Quadcopter tilts up from the motor which produces more thrust and moves in other direction. There are two different controls to control a quadcopter: • • Throttle Settings: Throttle controls the thrust of the thrust of the four motors produce. When the stick on a RC is pushed forward or backward, the thrust produced increases and decreases. The signal is sent from the RC is received by the ight computer on the drone via a receiver and this signal is sent to the motors from the ight computer. Trim Settings: Trim settings are the minor adjustments are done to ight controls when the quadcopter is out of balance. The following are the main components of a quadcopter; • Fig. 4. Pitch Movement of a Quadcopter. • Yaw: This motion is produced when two motors are at constant thrust and the remaining two motor produce the same amount of thrust but slightly greater than the constant thrust produced by the other two motors. When CW motors produce constant thrust and CCW motors produce more thrust (simultaneously), the quadcopter yaws in right direction. When CCW motors produce constant thrust and CW motors produce more thrust (simultaneously), the quadcopter yaws in left direction. • Brushless DC Motors (BLDC): It is a synchronous DC powered electric motor which is controlled electronically using speed controllers. The relation between voltage and rpm, current and torque is linearized. In a xed armature, the permanent magnet in the motor rotates [5]. The concept of Differential Thrust is anticipated in case of ying a quadcopter, Using the data fed into an on-board ight computer is processed and the required impulses are sent to the respective BLDC motors [6]. Electronic Speed Controllers: Electronic Speed Controllers(ESC) sends out a signal to the motors to spin at a given speed and any given instance. In total, quadcopter has four motors and these motors have individual ESC’s connected to it which further connected to main power source of the drone. ESC synchronize with the motors in a way that they help the drone to stay stable. Authorized licensed use limited to: University of Exeter. Downloaded on June 28,2020 at 13:09:25 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply. Fig. 7. Disassembled view of an Brushless motor. • • Li-Po Battery: Li-Po stands for Lithium Polymer; it is a rechargeable battery made up multiple packets of cells connected to each other to get a greater voltage. They are available in many capacities and shapes. The most preferred one is a 3S LI-Po battery for a quadcopter which gives out around 10 minutes of ying time. The power rating of a Li-Po battery is denoted by the symbol ‘C’ or else it is mentioned in math. C species the time taken to withdraw an amount of power from the battery i.e., tells us how much power would be given out as a supply. Fixed Pitch Propellers: Propellers help to generate lift on a quadcopter through rotational motion. The structure of a propeller is based upon the concept of Bernoulli’s principle and third Law of motion. In a quadcopter, a total of four propellers are required, two of them would have a xed pitch for Clockwise rotation and remaining two would have a xed pitch for counter-clockwise rotation. Two reference systems are taking into consideration for studying the ight dynamics about a quadcopter: - Inertial reference system (Earth frame- XE, YE, ZE) and quadrotor reference system (Body frame- XB, YB, ZB. It is represented in ways like quaternion, Euler angle and direction matrix. When stabilization of a quadcopter is taken into consideration, all reference angles are required respective to its axes to takeoff, land and hover and to ensure it maintains a level ight [7]. The need to control drones in hazardous environments and make them sturdy against actuator failures is done by utilizing variations in the control model to improve adaptive control techniques [8]. In expense hover technology is established using an inexpensive micro-controller for hovering at a steady [9]. Stability allows for an unskilled drone operator to y quadcopter ease and improving the stability of capturing security surveillance data and images. Also, prevents the drone from collapsing onto obstacles due to strong gusts of winds and imbalance payload weight on the quadcopter. A quadcopter has six degrees of freedom, x and y axes represent roll (θ) and pitch (φ) which are known as a translational motion to the respective axes and z-axis represent yaw (ψ) action which is rotational motion. A reasonable amount of research activity has been performed to achieve a describable ight dynamics mathematical model for a quadcopter [10], [11], [12], [13]. Arduino microprocessor is utilised to construct a ight controller using the Proportional Integral Derivative (PID) control algorithm. It is a kind of linearized control which is extensively utilised Fig. 8. Representation of Six Degree of Freedom. in the robotics and automation eld [14], [15], [16] and it is primarily used because [17] ; 1) Less complex structure 2) Improves performance 3) Easier to tune even when the controlled system lacks a specic model PID usually operates by calculation the error value between the required value and the measured value and ne-tune the control system inputs to decrease the value of the calculated error. P represents the reaction to the current error, I represent the reaction based on a sum of recent errors and D responds to the rate at which the error has been changing and ne-tuning of every PID controller consists in nding its gains: KP i , KIi , KDi [18] andand is represented by the below mathematical equation [19], u(k) = kp e(k) + KI k ∑ (e(i) + KD (e(k) − e(k − 1)) (1) i=0 Fig. 9. Methodology to Obtain Control Parameters. UAV’s have benetted many industries in United Arab Emirates. But due to extensive ability of inexpensive UAV’s have made it easier to acquire a UAV easily in UAE. UAE government has come up with a legal framework to regulate the laws for the drone pilots [20]. Abuse of UAV’s indirectly threatens the national security of a country and to maintain the security across the airspace of a country, it needs to come up with a framework to prevent such misuse. Many airline industries are threatened by the UAV activity in the airspace around airports [21]. According to International Civil Aviation Organization’s (ICAO) Global Air Trafc Management (ATM) operational concept (Doc9854) state that “an unmanned aerial vehicle is a pilotless aircraft, in the sense of Article 8 of the Convention on International Civil Aviation, which is own without a pilot-in-command on-board and is either remotely Authorized licensed use limited to: University of Exeter. Downloaded on June 28,2020 at 13:09:25 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply. and fully controlled from another place (ground, another aircraft, space) or programmed and fully autonomous” [22]. Drone industry is growing at drastic rate as well as the need of a regulatory frame work is also increasing day-by-day. Drone regulating laws in United Arab Emirates are as follows; 1) Part VIII Subpart 10 on the Operation of Unmanned Aerial Systems under Civil Aviation Regulation (CAR). 2) Dubai Law No. 7 of 2015 on Airspace Security and Safety in the Emirate of Dubai Law. 3) Federal Resolution No. 2 of 2015 for Light Air Sports Practice Regulations [23] The following are the issues commonly involved with use of a quadcopter; a) Safety hazard: As Lithium-Polymer batteries are extremely dangerous and expand and catch re readily when punctured. This increases a need of caution when it comes to ying a quadcopter. If own incorrectly, a UAV can y into obstacles which could damage the battery. b) Speed: Speed of a quadcopter highly depends on the capacity of the battery as well as on the need of the ight time to reach from origin to destination. Four brushless DC motors utilized the capacity of the battery at a higher rate. Other than the BLDC motors, batteries are utilized by navigation and recognition lights, ight computer and GPS system c) Weather Conditions: Extreme weather condition affects the operation of the quadcopter. Variation in temperature would cause the BLDC motor to burn up when temperature is high and can suddenly stall the operation and crash the quadcopter and if the temperature become too cold could make the battery drop its voltage and decrease the capacity of the battery than the regular capacity [24]. Fig. 11. Block Diagram of the System. C. Components Used To create such link of communication, we need sets of instrument to create a network and to understand the commands and also to perform according to the learnt commands. Along with all this in mind, we need to make sure the stability of the quadcopter remains undisturbed and can maintain a steady ight. The list of the components is listed out below to build the desired control conguration: a) Arduino UNO R3: It is a microcontroller board powered by ATmega328P. In total there are fourteen digital input/output pins among which six of them provide Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) output representation by the symbol tilde ( ) beside the respective pin number. It also consists of six analog input/output pins, 16MHz quartz crystal, USB connection (For programming and powering the unit), Power jack, ICSP header, Output power pins for 3.3V and 5V, ground connection pins and Reset button. The unit is programmed a software named Arduino IDE [25]. III. P ROJECT D ETAILS A. Aim Create an interface out of JavaScript based HTML webpage to communicate with the control conguration of the Arduino UNO based quadcopter via an inexpensive miniature Wi-Fi Transceiver module. Also to create a window to receive the live video-feed from the mobile phone camera transmitting through the same IP address. B. Circuit Diagram Fig. 10. Circuit Diagram of Arduino based Quadcopter. Fig. 12. Arduino UNO R3. TABLE I S PECIFICATION OF A RDUINO UNO Parameters Operating Voltage Input Voltage DC Current (3..3V) Flash Memory SRAM EEPROM Clock Speed Specications 5V 7-12 V 50mA 32 KB (ATmega328P) of which 0.5 KB is utilized by bootloader 2KB (ATmega328) 1KB (ATmega328) 16MHz b) SP 8266 Wi-Fi Module: Ai-thinker has manufactured a Wi-Fi chip fully capable of TCP/IP stack and 80MHz and 160 MHz clock speed. It is less expensive and low powered 32bit MCU micro, with 16-bit short mode. It has integrated Wi-Fi MAC/BB/RF/PA/LNA/ on-board antenna. Also supports standard IEEE802.11 b/g/n agreement. It has the capability of Authorized licensed use limited to: University of Exeter. Downloaded on June 28,2020 at 13:09:25 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply. producing an Access point or connecting an Access point or doing both simultaneously. TABLE II C ONNECTIONS OF MPU6050 TO UNO MPU 6050 (FROM) VCC GND SCL SDA Fig. 13. ESP8266 ARDUINO UNO REV3 (TO) 5V GND A4 A5 TABLE III C OMPONENT L IST Sr. No 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Name of the Component DJI F450 Quadcopter Frame DJI 2312E BLDC Motors (960KV) DJI ESC E-Series 430 Lite (30A) Arduino Uno R3 ESP8266 12-F Wi-Fi Module MPU-6050 Gyroscopic-Accelerometer sensor DUPU 4200 35C 4s Battery Power Bank Quantity 1 4 4 1 1 1. 1 1 Fig. 14. Schematics of ESP8266 12F connected to Arduino UNO c) MPU 6050 SENSOR: MPU-6050 is made up of MEMS accelerometer and gyro, it is highly accurate and it converts 16 bits analog to digital for individual channels so that x, y and z channel can be read at any particular instance. To interface with Arduino I2C-bus is used. For a sensor containing two different sensors, it costs less. Fig. 17. Pre-Structure of the Quadcopter Fig. 15. MPU 6050 Fig. 18. Quadcopter xed on a Balancing apparatus for obtaining PID gains Fig. 16. Schematics of MPU6050 connection with Arduino Uno R3 IV. R ESULTS & C ONCLUSION After installing the components as per the circuit diagram and uploading constructed ight program onto the Arduino Fig. 19. Wi-Fi Module Connection Run-up Authorized licensed use limited to: University of Exeter. Downloaded on June 28,2020 at 13:09:25 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply. Fig. 20. Highlights of the Quadcopter Flight Program UNO based ight computer, the desired quadcopter construction was completed. Using the PID conguration algorithms and balancing tool, desired gains for proportional, integral and derivative were obtained to calibrate the gyroscope to level zero around x, y and z axes to maintain a steady ight for the quadcopter. To obtain a clear live video-feed, a high-speed network and a high megapixel mobile phone camera or a portable camera which would transmit via wireless network. Due to the capacity of the battery, the ight time of the quadcopter was limited to 15 minutes. Other factors affected the quadcopter were balancing of the payload on the head of quadcopter to maintain its center of gravity and also wind turbulence makes the quadcopter lose its stability and high vibration propagated from the brushless dc motors varies the values of the x, y and z axes on the gyroscope. R EFERENCES [1] Igor Gaponov, Anastasia Razinkova (2012/08/01) Quadcopter Design and Implementation as a Multidisciplinary Engineering Course, ResearchGate: ResearchGate. [2] David R. E., Sava J., Jogendra M. K. (2016), DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF QUADCOPTER DRONE WITH KK 2.1.5 FLIGHT CONTROLLER: ResearchGate. [3] Gabriel M. Hoffmann, Haomiao Huang, Steven L. Waslander, Claire J. Tomlin, Quadrotor Helicopter Flight Dynamics and Control: Theory and Experiment. [4] Kyaw Myat Thua*, A.I. Gavrilov (2017) ’Designing and modeling of quadcopter control system using L1 adaptive control’ [5] Saleque, Ahmed (2014) Design of a Brushless DC (BLDC) motor controller [6] Kevin Angstadt, Westley Weime, Quadcopter Basics: Opportunities and Challenges [7] Almurib HAF, Nathan PT, Kumar TN. Control and path planning of quadrotor aerial vehicles for search and rescue. SICE Annual Conference (SICE), 2011: 700-705. [8] Gavrilov AI, Kyaw Myat Thu, Budnikova EA, Synthesis of automatic control system quadrocopter, International Conference on Control in Marine and Aerospace System, St.Petersburg, Russia, UMAS-2014, 2014. [9] Semsch, Eduard; Jakob, Michal; Pavlicek, Dušan; Pechoucek, Michal; , ”Autonomous UAV Surveillance in Complex Urban Environments,” Web [10] Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technologies, 2009. WI-IAT ’09. IEEE/WIC/ACM International Joint Conferences on , vol.2, no., pp.8285, 15-18 Sept. 2009 [11] T. Bresciani, “Modeling, Identication and Control of a Quadrotor Helicopter”, master’s thesis, Department of Automatic Control, Lund University, Sweden, October 2008. [12] H. Huang, G. M. Hoffmann, S. L. Waslander, C. J. Tomlin, “Aerodynamics and Control of Autonomous Quadrotor Helicopters in Aggressive Maneuvering” in Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Kobe, Japan) May 2009. [13] S. Bouadballah, R. Siegwart, “Full Control of a Quadrotor” in Proceedings of the 2007 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robotics and Systems (San Diego, CA, USA) October 29- November 2, 2007. [14] Bouabdallah, S.; Murrieri, P.; Siegwart, R.; , ”Design and control of an indoor micro quadrotor,” Robotics and Automation, 2004. Proceedings. ICRA ’04. 2004 IEEE International Conference on , vol.5, no., pp. 43934398 Vol.5, 26 April-1 May 2004. [15] Erginer, B.; Altug, E.; , ”Modeling and PD Control of a Quadrotor VTOL Vehicle,” Intelligent Vehicles Symposium, 2007 IEEE , vol., no., pp.894-899, 13-15 June 2007 [16] Tayebi, A.; McGilvray, S.; , ”Attitude stabilization of a VTOL quadrotor aircraft,” Control Systems Technology, IEEE Transactions on , vol.14, no.3, pp. 562- 571, May 2006 [17] K. Nonami, F.Kendoul, S. Suzuki, W. Wang, D. Nakazawa, Autonomous Flying Robots – Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and Micro Aerial Vehicles, Tokyo: Springer, 2010, pp.48-52. [18] Kiam Heong Ang; Chong, G.; Yun Li; , ”PID control system analysis, design, and technology,” Control Systems Technology, IEEE Transactions on , vol.13, no.4, pp. 559- 576, July 2005 [19] Leszek Cedroa, Krzysztof Wieczorkowski (2019) ’Optimizing PID controller gains to model the performance of a quadcopter’ [20] Bernard Tat Meng Leong, Sew Ming Low, Melanie Po-Leen Oo (2012) ’Low-Cost Microcontroller-based Hover Control Design of a Quadcopter’ [21] N. S. Sarath Raj, Jerrin Varghese, Geetajnali Ramesh Chandra (2018) ’Drones Take-off Towards Legal Regime in the United Arab Emirates’, IEEE, (10.1109/ICTUS.2017.8286095) [22] Schenkman, J. 1955. International civil aviation organization (No. BOOK). [sn]. [23] 2015. ICAO Capacity & Efciency. Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) regulatory framework and challenges. 1, 1-24. Available at: http: //www.icao.int/NACC/Documents/Meetings/2015/SARWORK SHOP/SARP06.pdf [24] Al-Mirsal. (2019). The Legal Landscape for Drones in the UAE AlMirsal. [online] Available at: . [25] Sarath Raj N.S, Jerrin Thadathil Varghese, Feni Pandya (2019) ’Unmanned Aerial Vehicle for Human Tracking using Face Recognition System’, IEEE, (10.1109/ICASET.2019.8714440) [26] Arduino; Arduino UNO REV3, Available at: . Authorized licensed use limited to: University of Exeter. Downloaded on June 28,2020 at 13:09:25 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
