Undergraduate Project: Autonomous Drone
A quadcopter UAV project that combines advanced flight control with computer vision capabilities, designed to tackle complex navigation tasks and demonstrate real-world applications in autonomous flight.
Project Motivation
Drone applications are expanding rapidly, from entertainment to military and industrial uses, driving market growth. Taiwan's advantage in drone development stems from its strong ICT industry, providing key components like batteries, chips, cameras, and antennas. This mature supply chain offers cost benefits in R&D. Our research focuses on integrating stable drone flight and image recognition with ROS (Robot Operating System). We aim to demonstrate our achievements by completing the TDK flying competition course. This project leverages Taiwan's ICT strengths to advance drone technology, particularly in flight stability and computer vision, potentially leading to broader industrial applications and innovations in the drone sector.
Development Process
The project development was divided into two main phases:
- Phase 1: Mechanical design, including Solidworks modeling and 3D printing
- Phase 2: Programming implementation using ROS, MAVROS, and Airsim for testing
Project Achievements
Successfully developed a quadcopter drone with advanced capabilities:
- Hardware Integration: Pixhawk 4 Mini flight control, Jetson Xavier NX, optical flow sensor, LiDAR, and IMX219-120 Camera
- Image Recognition: Advanced segmentation techniques to reduce shadow interference
- Flight Stability: Enhanced indoor navigation using optical flow and LiDAR for GPS-denied environments
