A UAV-based computer engineering capstone senior design project

The paper describes the development of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) for a capstone senior design project in computer engineering. The student portion of the project involved the development of a flight control system for the UAV. The flight control system was based on the Atmel FPSLIC device. The FPSLIC contains an 8-bit AVR microcontroller and a 40K gate-equivalent field programmable gate array which allowed the students to implement components of the flight control system in both hardware and software. The overall system architecture and implementation of the flight control system are described.