Development of a low cost quadrotor platform for swarm experiments

The goal of this work was to develop an aerial platform which facilitates the experimental testing of swarm and formation control algorithms. A sub-$500 carbon fibre quadrotor was designed and fitted with the open source ArdupilotMega 2.0 avionics and commercial off the shelf electronics. The quadrotors were controlled from a desktop computer running the Robot Operating System (ROS) software environment and using a Vicon motion capture system for position feedback. To facilitate the computer control, a serial interface was developed utilising a conventional 2.4GHz radio control and Arduino board. Controllers were implemented and tuned to facilitate control over position or velocity/position hybrid trajectories. Using a MATLAB interface, the complete platform has been demonstrated with three quadrotors flying simultaneously. It was found that a single quadrotor is able to hover at a desired position with a mean offset of 6cm and standard deviation of 2cm.