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Hi, drone developers. I am a master student at department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, University of Tokyo.

Let me share our ‘Completely Autonomous (Onboard Processing) Palm-sized Quadcopter’, developed in our lab.

PERFORMANCE

Check out <video1> to see how it flies without any control by external equipments. All the processing required to maintain stable flight is done inside the onboard computer.

<video1>

This performance is realized by processing images obtained by the camera attached at the bottom of quadcopter and by real-time self localization. As mentioned above, all these calculation is processed onboard. So it needs no external system to fly stably. (Actually the quadcopter is communicating with PC only to transmit flight log. It receives no signal.)

STRUCTURE

Here is the list of components.

- frame (3D printer)

- motor + motor driver + propeller(x4)

- main board

  - MCU(Cortex-M4)

  - FPGA(Spartan-6)

  - DDRSDRAM(64MB)

  - IMUs

     -- KXRB5-2050( 3 axis accelerometer)

     -- LPR4150AL (roll, pitch gyro)

     -- LY3100ALH (yaw gyro)

     -- HMC5883L (3 axis compass)

- battery (x2)

- camera

- sonar sensor

Circuit Overview

Back Side

Side View

The quadcopter in the top picture and the video is an old version. The current version has two cameras - one horizontal and the other downward.

current version of prototype 

Length(motor to motor): 120mm (4.7inches)

Weight: 70g

SYSTEM

The system consists of a CPU(ARM), FPGA and a memory. FPGA enables the very fast onboard processing. 

For further information, please leave comments. (We are now writing more detailed technical description. I hope you will enjoy.)

Horiken engineering,