Design and implementation of a quadrotor for indoor swarm research

Quadrotors have become a commonly used research platform in aerial robotics for the last decade. With the ability of flying in three-dimensional space, quadrotors possess great academic potential in control theory, synchronous localization and mapping (SLAM), robot swarm, etc. In this work, a small size autopilot system based on STM32 microcontrollers is designed and a quadrotor platform made with off-the-shelf components is developed. A classic PID controller is implemented in the autopilot system, and the performance of this quadrotor platform is tested in a series of experiments. The results demonstrated that the platform is stable, compact, easy to build and highly extensible.