DJI Tello Quadrotor as a Platform for Research and Education in Mobile Robotics and Control Engineering

Multirotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with various sensors and cameras on board are commonly used as experimental flying platforms for research and education in mobile robotics and control engineering. In the academic community, especially low-cost, ready-to-use, compact-size flying robots attract a lot of researchers attention due to the high level of safety they offer during experiments conducted in GPS-denied indoor laboratory spaces. In recent years, the DJI Tello quadrotor has gained importance. This nano-class UAV may be found in laboratories around the world and is often the first drone used by students and young scientists in their projects. This paper presents the potential of the drone as a useful experimental platform. Its hardware and software architecture, mathematical model with parametrization, as well as proposed new state machine (node for Robot Operating System) are presented. Moreover, representative research results on UAV position control based on cascade fuzzy neural network are illustrated. Exemplary student projects conducted with the use of DJI Tello are also shown. These projects are as follows: (a) “TelloBird” (QR trajectory generator), (b) “Sentry drone” for detecting and tracking any humans entering a given area. The considered UAV is used there as a rapid prototyping platform supported by the tello ros package in ROS.SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIALhttps://youtu.be/AV0gq1E_Cx8